May 14, 2001
Danish Environment Minister Svend Auken on Monday urged the United States not to "poison" the UN's Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which Washington rejects and has promised to rival with its own proposals.
"We cannot afford to scrap the result of 10 years of hard work," Auken said here. "The Kyoto Protocol is the only arena in town and the international community should not accept that the Kyoto Protocol is replaced by improvised or unilateral solutions."
Auken said that plans by the George W. Bush administration to float its own proposals to Kyoto should not deter efforts, at talks in Bonn in July, to complete the treaty's rulebook. "The non-ratifiers should refrain from obstructing the drafting of the rules. As I said to recently to friends in the American administration, 'don't poison the pie you will not eat'."
Auken was speaking at an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development forum ahead of talks here Wednesday and Thursday gathering OECD environment, economy and finance and energy ministers.
The Kyoto Protocol aims to reduce output of carbon gases mainly released by burning oil, coal, gas. Scientists say these emissions are gradually causing the Earth's atmospheric to warm, with potentially catastrophic effects on the climate a few decades from now.
The US was among the countries that signed the framework treaty in 1997 and joined them in complex, bitterly fought negotiations to agree on the document's machinery. But in March, the Bush administration stunned fellow signatories by saying it would not ratify the agreement, arguing it was too costly for the US economy and unfair because developing countries are not bound to any emission cuts.
Ratifying Kyoto will be tough without the United States, as it must include countries representing at least 55 percent of the industrialized world's emissions. The United States alone accounts for 36 percent of output by industrialized countries.
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