Earth Summit Delegates Close In on Final Agreements : Environment: Some differences remain, but it appears most business will be finished before Bush and other leaders arrive.

With this bustling Brazilian city braced for the arrival of 116 presidents and prime ministers, delegates to the 178-nation summit on the global environment and world development Wednesday night closed in on their last elusive agreements.

Though differences persisted over financing language that had kept negotiators at work on Tuesday night until almost 4 a.m. Wednesday, it appeared in the later Wednesday session that nearly all of the meeting’s business would be wrapped up before world leaders step to center stage on Friday.

President Bush, who was to leave Washington early today en route to Rio by way of Panama, has been the conference’s most controversial figure since the meeting opened a week ago, and his Friday speech to delegates is expected to be a climactic moment.

In Washington, the White House made clear that Bush intends to maintain a defiant U.S. stance in support of his opposition to stronger environmental accords.

Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said the President plans to deliver, as he departs, an aggressive speech in which he is to confront his critics with the “hard truths” behind the U.S. positions.

Those positions have left the United States increasingly isolated and have made White House officials apprehensive about how Bush will be received. But the President and his advisers have clearly decided to counterattack rather than suffer in silence.

In defending his refusal to accept stricter rules to prevent global warming or to sign a pact on biodiversity to conserve plants, animals and habitat, Bush is to stress what Fitzwater called “the need for a balance between environmental protection and economic growth.”

Fitzwater said Bush’s departure remarks and his brief address Friday in Rio would include “fairly aggressive remarks in which he sets out the hard truths about environmental protection that we believe should be pointed out.”

Throughout his stay in Rio, Fitzwater said, Bush will “make the point that we’re taking the right position on behalf of American jobs and industry in trying to balance our objectives at home with the objectives of the Earth Summit.”

Heads of state and heads of government will each be allotted seven minutes to address summit delegates on Friday and Saturday.

“I am sure the President will be welcomed and his message will be very carefully looked at,” said Maurice Strong, secretary general of the U.N.-sponsored meeting. “And I believe he will have a good message for us.”

Bush is expected to arrive here not long after 12:01 a.m. Friday. In addition to addressing the summit plenary later in the day, he will sign the global warming treaty, which remains a source of controversy between the United States and its industrial allies because of U.S. insistence that it should not include timetables and targets for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases.

Some Administration officials have suggested that European protests may be disingenuous because those nations have no plans to fulfill the treaties they sign.

Before leaving Rio on Saturday, the President is scheduled to conduct a news conference and hold individual meetings with other leaders here.

Europeans smarted Wednesday at White House criticism of their role here and the characterization of the summit as a circus, but Laurens Brinkhorst, leader of the European Community delegation, said the world’s new concern over “sustainable development” confronts the United States with difficult cultural changes.

When the President makes his long-awaited appearance, Brinkhorst said in an interview, “there will be a serious effort by people who have been here for 10 days to explain that this is a very, very serious meeting.”

As delegates began another round of evening negotiations on Wednesday, the United States announced that it was abandoning a possible demand to rewrite language it considers objectionable in the “Rio Declaration,” one of the four major documents to be completed by conferees.

For days, many delegations had advised against such a move at the last moment, and the U.S. delegation chairman, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William K. Reilly, acknowledged that keeping the option open was in part a negotiating tactic.

A source in the U.S. delegation in Rio said negotiators had concluded that the tactic had served its purpose--language that the United States had found objectionable in the summit’s massive Agenda 21 environmental action plan was being successfully changed.

Three passages in the Agenda 21 chapter on financing remained in contention. The most serious was a dispute over the deadline for developed nations to reaffirm commitment to a U.N. goal of contributing 0.7% of their gross national product to assistance in the developing world.

Bush Administration negotiators have taken the position that the matter is moot as far as the United States is concerned, since the United States has never accepted the U.N. target, which would require a tripling of American foreign aid.

Although delegates were apparently close to completion of language spelling out the way environmental aid will be transferred to developing nations, it was far from clear how much will be made available to carry out the summit’s initiatives.

Experts have concluded that $125 billion per year would be necessary to fully implement scores of programs.

Just how much the industrial nations will offer will be revealed when the world leaders step to the summit podium one by one. Japan is expected to announce a contribution of $6 billion to $8 billion over 5 years. As the summit opened, the Administration announced a $150 million-per-year contribution to forest protection and challenged other countries to join its initiative.

Reilly said the United States has made new commitments totaling $250 million a year as a result of the summit initiatives.

There has been no indication that Bush will offer anything more.

The United States has made a statement of principles on forest protection its foremost initiative at the summit, and that remained one of the unresolved matters.

Along with other Northern governments, the Bush Administration had hoped to get a summit endorsement of an international effort to write a binding convention on forest protection, but that proposal has been frustrated by delegations from Malaysia and India.

At the insistence of African nations, the summit is also expected to endorse the drafting of a convention addressing the problem of advancing deserts.

After first expressing disapproval of the approach, saying it would be more effective to work on the problem through existing programs, the United States on Wednesday switched its position.

Upon further consideration, said principal negotiator Michael K. Young, it had been concluded that there are valid political reasons for drafting a desertification convention. Barring some further complication not foreseen, the summit negotiations have gone more smoothly than many had expected.

Strong, for one, predicted on the eve of its opening that there would be times when the conference appeared on the verge of collapse before sharply divided delegates could find consensus on crucial matters.

Abramson reported from Rio and Jehl from Washington.