Congress to Host Meeting on Global Warming Issue : Environment: Senators say it’s time to act on pressing issues. But they deny seeking to upstage the Administration.

Getting a jump on the Bush Administration, Congress announced Thursday that a first-ever conference of legislators from 33 nations will be convened in Washington next spring to consider global warming and other environmental issues.

While it will precede by six months an international meeting on global warming to be hosted by President Bush, Senate sponsors of the April 29-May 2 meeting said it is intended to spur international cooperation, not to upstage the President.

“We believe the time for action is now,” said Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate delegation to the conference. “We are ready to move.”

Gore insisted that the conference was not an exercise in one-upmanship. “This is in no way partisan,” he said. “We are not taking an adversarial position against the Administration.”

Others in the seven-member Senate delegation said the meeting would give the United States a chance again to assume leadership on worldwide environmental issues that had been lost during the Reagan Administration. A House delegation will be named later.

Congressional sources said the conference of lawmakers--authorized by legislation approved last August--reflected a bipartisan concern that Bush was not responding fast enough to serious global problems despite his call for a major overhaul of the nation’s clean-air laws.

About 250 legislators--including some from the Soviet Union, Poland and Hungary, but none from China--were invited to the spring conference. The participants will seek consensus on a new set of environmental goals to deal with global warming and other major concerns.

Gore said climate change, deforestation, the spread of deserts, depletion of the ozone layer, vanishing species, the impact of population growth and prospects for sustainable development would be the leading issues before the conference of lawmakers.

“The global ecological crisis we face demands unprecedented responses such as this--the first-ever gathering of the legislators ultimately responsible for ... policies needed to change our future and the course of our world for generations to come,” Gore said.

Sen. John H. Chafee (R-R.I.) said the United States should take the lead on global environmental problems. By the time the conference is held, Chafee predicted, the Senate will have approved a clean-air bill that would eliminate production of chlorofluorocarbons by the year 2000 and reduce carbon dioxide emissions from cars.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said the conference would enable the United States to regain its pre-eminent position on environmental issues. Sen. John Heinz (R-Pa.) contended that the federal government was lagging behind the states and individual citizens on these issues.

“Environmental isolationism must be a way of the past,” Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) said in a statement. “Our planet has become too small to insist on acting alone or to insist on acting only if everyone adopts the same policy.”

President Bush had initially resisted calls for an international conference on global warming. During his Malta talks with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, however, Bush reversed himself and announced that the United States would host such a meeting next fall.

The Administration was criticized at a meeting in the Netherlands last month when it opposed efforts by virtually all other industrialized nations to limit gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect.

In February, two months before the congressional conference, an International Panel on Climate Change composed of scientists and other experts will meet in Washington to consider new evidence on global warming and devise ways to deal with it.