Critics Blast Bush Administration Obstructionism at Climate Summit in Bali

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U.S.: ‘We’re not ready’ to pledge emissions cuts
Critics clamor for action, accuse U.S. of trying to subvert U.N. negotiations


BALI, Indonesia - The United States will come up with its own plan to cut global-warming gases by mid-2008, and won’t commit to mandatory caps at the U.N. climate conference, the chief U.S. negotiator said Saturday.

“We’re not ready to do that here,” said Harlan Watson, the State Department’s senior climate negotiator and special representative. “We’re working on that, what our domestic contribution would be, and again we expect that sometime before the end of the Major Economies process.”

That process of U.S.-led talks was inaugurated last September by President Bush, who invited 16 other “major economies” such as the Europeans, Japan, China and India, to Washington to discuss a future international program of cutbacks in carbon dioxide and other emissions blamed for global warming.

Environmentalists accuse the Bush administration of using those parallel talks to subvert the long-running U.N. negotiations and the spirit of the binding Kyoto Protocol, which requires 36 industrial nations to make relatively modest cuts in “greenhouse” gases.

The United States is the only major industrial country to have rejected Kyoto and its obligatory targets. The U.S. leadership instead favors a more voluntary approach, in which individual nations determine what they can contribute to a global effort, without taking on obligations under the U.N. climate treaty.

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22161267/