Global warming fight advances

Britain and Sweden are on target for reducing global-warming gases, but other countries will have to toughen policies and rely on “carbon trading” to achieve their Kyoto Protocol goals by 2012, according to a new U.N. report.

In the United States, meanwhile, emissions of so-called greenhouse gases climbed by 16 percent between 1990 and 2004, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in its latest assessment. The United States, by far the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming, rejects the Kyoto pact on reductions.

Against this backdrop of rising emissions and discord over what to do about them, delegates from more than 160 nations on May 26 wrapped up two weeks of semiannual U.N. sessions in Bonn, Germany, on how to confront the threat of climate change.

On one track, they began talks on a stricter regime of emissions cuts for Kyoto nations after the 2012 expiration of that 1997 agreement, named for the Japanese city where it was negotiated. On a second, less formal track, they began a “dialogue,” including U.S. representatives, to try to draw Washington and other outsiders into the mandatory controls system.

“Both tracks got going in a fairly smooth way,” Richard Kinley, chief U.N. organizer of the sessions, told the Associated Press. “It means there will be some very intensive talks in the next two, three years.”

For more than a decade, a U.N.-organized network of scientists has warned of shifting climate zones, rising oceans and more extreme weather events if emissions of heat-trapping gases were not reined in.

Kyoto, a protocol to the 1992 U.N. climate treaty, mandates controls in 35 industrialized countries that on average would reduce greenhouse emissions by 5 percent from their 1990 levels by 2012, with varying limits assigned to individual countries.

At this point, among 18 countries reporting, “only the United Kingdom and Sweden are projected to meet their individual Kyoto targets with current policies and measures,” U.N. experts said in a progress report issued at the Bonn meeting.

But such growing economies as Spain and Greece are projected to far overshoot their allowances. Canada, with a targeted reduction of 6 percent, says it is now emitting 30 percent more greenhouse gases than in 1990.

In Washington, the Bush administration says it will rely on industry’s voluntary cutbacks and on government investment in clean-energy technologies to reduce emissions. In April, however, federal auditors reported that supposed voluntary cutbacks are being inadequately monitored.

The White House objects that Kyoto-style mandates would badly crimp the U.S. economy, and complains that China, India and other poorer but fast-growing economies are not regulated by Kyoto.