U.S. Leader Quits Global-Warming Team

Less than two weeks before the start of crucial talks on an international accord to curtail global warming, the senior State Department official spearheading the U.S. effort in the negotiations confirmed on Wednesday that he plans to quit, leaving his colleagues angry and confused.

Undersecretary of State Timothy E. Wirth accepted a position as president of the United Nations Foundation, established by Ted Turner to oversee the distribution of the up to $1 billion the communications mogul recently pledged to donate to the world body.

Wirth had been widely seen as likely to head the U.S. delegation to the global-warming talks in Kyoto, Japan, which begin Dec. 1. His departure, hastily disclosed by Turner, clearly dismayed other Clinton administration aides and sent them scurrying to find another candidate to lead the U.S. team.

“The timing of it I find very awkward,” said a senior State Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Administration officials did little to play down the impression that the departure was creating turmoil at a most difficult moment.

A White House official, who also asked not to be named, said: “It’s very odd, this man is leaving two weeks before the actual conference he’s worked on for two years. It’s confounding. It is a shock.”

Wirth’s departure from the State Department is likely to take effect by the end of December.

A Turner spokesman, David Harwood, said the appointment was announced ahead of the Kyoto talks because “Mr. Turner is anxious to get going” on the distribution of the funds he has pledged to U.N. economic, environmental, social and humanitarian work.

In a telephone interview from New York, Wirth said he had been discussing the position for some time with Turner, and that “this kind of a chance doesn’t come up often in a lifetime.”

He said he still expects “to be an enthusiastic member” of the U.S. delegation. “I don’t see what going to Turner has to do with being on this team,” Wirth said.

But other administration officials questioned whether Wirth would have a role in Kyoto. Instead, they said, the top job would be handed to someone else, with Stuart E. Eizenstat, the undersecretary of State for economic affairs and former U.S. ambassador to the European Union, said to be the leading candidate.

“Stu Eizenstat would be terrific,” Wirth said.

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Less likely, but still a possibility, was the naming of Vice President Al Gore to head the delegation.

Wirth, who as recently as last week played a leading role in preliminary negotiations in Tokyo, insisted that he had not expected to be named to lead the team.

Still, the turmoil created by his decision to leave the government almost surely means that someone less familiar with the complex details of the economic and environmental considerations attached to global warming will be given the task of representing the United States, which is widely seen as having the most at stake in the negotiations.

Wirth’s new job was disclosed as 15 national environmental organizations stepped up the pressure on President Clinton to attend the Kyoto talks himself.

The groups have been dissatisfied with his proposal to reduce carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases emitted by the major industrialized nations.

Participation by the president in the talks, they wrote to Clinton in a letter made public Wednesday, “would signal to the world your recognition of the seriousness and urgency of the global-warming problem, and would provide impetus for a successful outcome in Kyoto.”

White House officials have not said Clinton would not attend, but they have given no suggestion that he will.

Wirth’s departure is the second such personnel shift to upset the State Department’s environmental unit in recent months.

Eileen Claussen, who had been the assistant secretary of State specializing in global-warming issues and other environmental matters, quit during the summer to begin a private consulting job.

Wirth represented Colorado in the House for 12 years and then was elected as a U.S. senator in 1986.

He declined to seek reelection in 1992 and was named to his post in the Clinton administration the following year.