U.S. Assails Its Critics at Summit : Environment: The Administration accuses allies of emphasizing rhetoric over action. Tensions in Rio could make the conference an ordeal for President Bush.

The Bush Administration sounded an angry protest Tuesday against the mounting criticism it has endured at the Earth Summit, accusing U.S. allies of paying lip service to environmentalism by emphasizing rhetoric over action.

The counterattack by two senior Administration officials set a confrontational tone in advance of President Bush’s two-day visit--beginning early Friday morning--to the summit in Rio de Janeiro.

With Bush facing condemnation for his refusal to go along with far-reaching proposals on biodiversity and global warming, the Administration took extraordinary steps to trumpet its own environmental record and to suggest that other nations merely “talk about what to do.”

“Our rhetoric may not have matched that of other countries. Our action has surpassed them,” one senior official said bluntly at a formal White House briefing.

The last-minute U.S. offensive was clearly aimed most directly at Germany and other European nations, which have complained bitterly about the American refusal to endorse a specific timetable for the reduction of emissions blamed for global warming.

Stressing that the United States had a plan to fulfill its more modest commitment, the officials questioned whether its allies were prepared to back up their bolder rhetoric. Asked whether he was charging the Europeans with duplicity, one briefer responded by saying that a senior European official had confided to him that his country did not take environmental agreements as seriously as other treaties.

The accusatory words from Washington come at a time when tensions at the 12-day conference are already high and threaten to transform what was to be a triumphant presidential appearance there into an uncomfortable ordeal.

In Rio, Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) said: “When President Bush flies to the Earth Summit, he will find that the New World Order looks a lot more like Rio than did the Gulf War. The Earth Summit is perhaps the most formidable attempt at international cooperation in history, utilizing not F-16s and smart bombs but scientific analysis, mutual respect and reasoned debate.”

Miller said nearly everyone in his delegation “was struck by the palpable resentment toward our country both from the developed nations and the developing world. The anger is especially strong toward President Bush for his well-publicized efforts to dilute the global warming convention and his refusal to sign the agreement on biological diversity.”

In Washington, the sharpest comments about other nations were made by senior U.S. officials from a White House podium under ground rules that forbade identifying them by name. One senior Administration official suggested that Germany and Japan were seeking to make international decisions “in a politically correct fashion.” He also contended that the conference reflected an “Amerika with a ‘k’ school” that called for nations to “forget what the record is, just blame the United States.”

But the White House intent to strike a counterblow became evident when Chief of Staff Samuel K. Skinner emerged from his office and authorized one official to speak for the record before a battery of microphones outside.

“I’m not going to cast aspersions on them,” Robert E. Grady, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, said when asked about the European nations and their attitude. But he drew distinctions between U.S. action and other countries’ rhetoric.

The offensive was launched as part of a wider White House campaign designed to drown out the critical Earth Summit chorus by promoting what it calls Bush’s “great environmental record.”

As it sought to draw attention to the positive, the White House on Tuesday issued a glossy pamphlet proclaiming that the United States had “long been the world’s leader in environmental preservation.”

The senior officials used the briefing to recite a long litany of Bush environmental accomplishments that ranged from the Clean Air Act to efforts to ban drift-net fishing to its plan to plant a billion trees a year.

Skinner himself made a rare appearance in a semipublic White House hallway to add his voice to the protest about what officials called a caricature of the Bush record. “We have nothing to be embarrassed about,” he said as he perched atop a security guard’s desk. “We have something to be proud about.”

In sounding their protest so loud and late, the Administration officials acknowledged that the image of the United States has been badly wounded in the Earth Summit debate over the environmental treaties.

But they suggested that the nation had simply become “a convenient target” for a wide range of critics.

In reiterating that Bush will not sign the existing version of a treaty designed to promote biodiversity, the officials said the Administration needed to ensure that the U.S. role as a leader in biotechnology would not be threatened. On global warming, they said Bush would sign only a watered-down pact agreed to at the United Nations last month, and opposed as unrealistic efforts by the Europeans to make more specific nations’ commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Administration had sought to put a more positive imprint on the summit with a proposal for international forest preservation. But that bid has run into opposition from nations prompted in part by their enmity toward other U.S. positions.

So frustrating has that experience been for the Administration that one of the official briefers complained that “when you finally get down to serious environmental issues, people are not willing to translate talk into action.”

Bush began the effort to insulate himself from Earth Summit criticism Sunday, when he used a news conference at his Camp David, Md., retreat to announce that he had “nothing to apologize about” on the environmental front.

But the swipes taken at U.S. allies by the senior Administration officials Tuesday reflected the deepening frustration of a White House that has been unable to get its message heard over the roar of condemnation from Rio. In discussing clean water issues, one official went out of his way to contrast U.S. sewage treatment efforts with the “garbage going into the Mediterranean from European nations.”

A measure of the issue’s sensitivity could also be seen in a document circulated to members of the White House press corps accompanying Bush for his 40-hour visit in Rio.

A correspondent for USA Today who accompanied a U.S. delegation on a pre-summit trip wrote in a report for colleagues that the White House was “anticipating a hostile reception for Bush from just about every quarter.” But the comment carried a handwritten annotation from Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater.

“Untrue,” Fitzwater scrawled, “we expect a warm and friendly reception from every quarter.”

KEY DOCUMENT DEBATED: U.S. may try to alter summit declaration on principles for protecting the environment. A7

Global Warming

Carbon dioxide, or CO2, accounts for about half the gases in the atmosphere that trap the sun’s heat.

The dispute:

The European Community is urging industrialized countries to join it in taking tougher measures to tackle global warming than are laid down in a new U.N. treaty. The effort seemed likely to embarrass the United States, the biggest single source of “greenhouse effect” gases. Washington opposes binding commitments to limit output of carbon dioxide because of fears of how it could hurt the economy.

Sources of CO2:

About four-fifths of the world’s carbon dioxide comes from the burning of fossil fuels. The rest is from destroying vegetation, mainly from the burning of rain forests.

Top 5 CO2 producers (in metric tons): Germany: 0.6 million Japan: 1.0 million Former USSR: 3.8 million United States: 4.9 million

Times staff writer Rudy Abramson in Rio contributed to this story.