The top US negotiator at world climate change talks ruled out on Friday any chance of Washington backing the next agreement on cutting carbon pollution if the deal resembled the Kyoto Protocol already rejected by President George W. Bush.
"It's going to be very difficult for the United States to get back to a Kyoto-type (agreement) because it has a rigid target and timetable agreement" for emissions cuts, Harlan Watson, senior climate negotiator at the State Department, told journalists here.
"(...) For the foreseeable future, anyway, the United States would not be particularly pleased with the Kyoto framework. We think that there are basic difficulties, there are also some operational difficulties."
Bush delivered the UN's draft anti-global warming treaty a crippling blow in March 2001 when he announced that the United States -- the biggest single culprit for the pollution -- would not ratify the deal.
He said it was too costly for the US economy, which is overwhelmingly dependent on carbon-rich fossil fuels, and unfair because it did not tie India and China and other fast-growing populous countries to specific emissions cuts.
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http://www.spacedaily.com/2003/031114135500.5dgjl0p4.html