By Eva Sohlman
Reuter/ Planet ArkMay 10, 2001
Traditional US allies Canada, Japan and Australia could follow a US move to abandon the Kyoto protocol aimed at curbing global warming, an European Union commissioner said yesterday. "I think it will be hard for them not to back the United States as their economies are so dependent on the United States," Margot Wallstrom, EU Environment Commissioner, told Reuters in an interview.
She said such a move would deepen the global climate crisis after US President George W. Bush's rejected the treaty, arguing it would harm the US economy and unfairly exempted developing countries. But she expressed confidence that the United States - the world's top producer of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide - would rejoin the 1997 Kyoto protocol which had been backed by the previous Washington administration under Bill Clinton.
Wallstrom, who had attended an EU meeting on sustainable development in Stockholm, said she could not say when, as a move to rejoin was "all about timing", and that many factors affected the US agenda. "It is important we help them to dig themselves out of the hole where they sit today," Wallstrom said, referring to the widespread criticism of Washington after it rejected the Kyoto plan. "There are clearly different views on this within the Bush administration and there has been a certain embarrassment during our contacts with them," she said.
UN CLIMATE TALKS DELAY
Wallstrom said a delay of a possible United Nations climate meeting in Stockholm later this month to discuss the Kyoto treaty was not a serious setback, saying the process should be allowed time. The meeting has now been penciled in for June. "It is important we now show support for the UN climate forum which is trying to sort this out and don't stress them," she said.
The forum would be a follow-up to a UN meeting in New York last month when countries, including the United States, met to discuss how to proceed with Kyoto after the US withdrawal. The protocol calls on industrialized countries to cut their emissions of carbon dioxide by an average 5.2 percent between 1990 and 2012.
Many of the countries hope to reach a final agreement on the protocol at a UN summit in Bonn in July to be able to ratify the Kyoto plan before next year's follow-up to a 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. But Wallstrom said expectations for the Bonn meeting should not be too high as many issues in the treaty were still unresolved and that it was not likely a final agreement on Kyoto would be reached.
She said the climate talks would have to become more focused and that she thought there were too many reservations in the protocol. The meeting could be successful if the countries agreed on a system for trading emission rights as well as a control system to measure how if countries met emission targets, said Wallstrom who was heading to Russia to prepare for an EU meeting there in June.
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