Climate-Change Meeting Fizzles After Flare-Up

The U.N. conference on climate change collapsed in an embarrassing international fiasco after overnight parleys Saturday, as the United States and Western Europe twice failed to agree on the fine print of a plan for reducing polluting gases that are heating up the planet.

A baggy- and bleary-eyed British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who had been attempting to broker a transatlantic consensus, stalked out in obvious frustration, saying the negotiating marathon had left him “gutted”--devastated.

“We didn’t make it,” the leading Labor politician declared to reporters. “There is no deal, no.”

Officials of the Clinton administration, speaking on condition that they not be identified, blamed countries of the European Union for the fruitless end to the two-week meeting, which was supposed to put teeth in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on combating global warming.

After making what they termed a major concession in talks with leading European delegates overnight, the U.S. representatives, led by Undersecretary of State Frank Loy, thought that they had a deal by 8 a.m., but the package was subsequently rejected by a full caucus of the 15 EU members.

The Americans said that they then made an even more generous second offer after lunch but that the Europeans responded with a reopening of old disagreements and “America-bashing.”

“I don’t understand how the EU works, other than to say it doesn’t seem to work very well,” one weary senior U.S. official said.

Environmentalists from many countries lamented the diplomatic train wreck in The Hague as an act of ecological cowardice. “This meeting will be remembered as the moment when governments abandoned the promise of global cooperation to protect planet Earth,” the environmental organization Greenpeace said in a statement.

Outside the Netherlands Congress Center, the venue for the 181-nation gathering, some demonstrators donned black as a sign of mourning. Infuriated protesters shouted, “You’ve sunk the world!”

At 6:12 p.m., Dutch Environment Minister Jan Pronk brought down the final gavel before a largely empty hall. He said the conference was not over but merely “suspended” until an unspecified date.

“We can’t go home just by stating, by confessing, that we did not reach an agreement,” Pronk pleaded. “We should be aware we have been watched by the outside world. There were extremely high expectations of us.”

“We came so close, only to see our efforts unravel,” Loy, a Los Angeles native, told the meeting. “We didn’t quite manage to push it over the goal line.”

Some ecologists said the Europeans may have been shortsighted, because after Jan. 20, they may be negotiating with the White House of George W. Bush. The Republican presidential candidate has branded the commitments entered into in Kyoto, Japan, as unfair, while his Democratic opponent, Vice President Al Gore, involved himself intensely in negotiating them.

“This is likely to have been the European nations’ best opportunity to achieve a strong climate treaty, and they decided to pass it up,” said Philip E. Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, an American lobby. “After January, they could face a Bush administration almost certain to push for bigger loopholes.”

Speaking on behalf of the EU, French Environment Minister Dominique Voynet acknowledged that the realities of “internal U.S. politics” had led the Europeans to push for a deal in The Hague, but that they finally rejected “a bad agreement, an agreement reached on the cheap.”

For many environmentalists, blame for the debacle lay squarely on the shoulders of the United States. “Instead of accepting a protocol that would increase emissions into the atmosphere, the rest of the world said no,” said Jennifer Morgan of World Wildlife Fund International.

In Kyoto, nations agreed that the worldwide emissions of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide and methane should be reduced to 5.2% below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States alone releases an estimated 1.5 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere annually, a change in the natural equilibrium that scientists say is causing the temperature of the air and oceans to rise.

Some experts believe that global warming is behind often dramatic changes in the weather, from torrential rains in England this autumn to the years of drought that have threatened millions in the Horn of Africa with hunger or starvation.

The crunch came Saturday because of the varying interpretations by the Americans and some Western Europeans of the Kyoto Protocol. The United States insists that it and other nations should be able to earn credits toward emission-reduction targets because of existing or future forests and farmland, which soak up carbon dioxide and offset some emissions from factory smokestacks, cars and other sources.

Many Europeans see that as rewarding a country for doing nothing and insist on deep reductions in the burning of fossil fuels.

U.S. representatives originally wanted to credit America’s woodlands with sponging up 310 million tons of carbon yearly. Faced with international and environmental opposition, they slashed that figure to 125 million tons.

In Saturday morning’s down-to-the-wire talks with the Europeans, the Clinton administration’s representatives further ratcheted down the number to 75 million tons, people familiar with the negotiations said. Loy’s final, unanswered offer reportedly went even lower, to 40 million.

In closed-door talks held in sterile, fluorescent-lighted cubicles used by the delegates as offices, European negotiators agreed to the 75-million figure, as well as a mechanism to enforce emission reductions and a U.S. demand for unrestricted trading in so-called carbon credits, conference participants said.

That credit trading would allow a country that meets its “greenhouse-gas” reduction targets, in effect, to sell the right to pollute to a car plant in Detroit or to any other party that won the bidding. A similar system has been used with great efficacy in the U.S. to reduce acid rain.

When the European negotiators took the package back to a plenary session of the trade bloc’s members for formal approval, some countries, including Denmark, rejected it. Germany, which took part in the parleys with the Americans, reportedly switched and sided with the “nos.”

“We are 15. We don’t necessarily have the same interests at the same moment,” said Voynet, acknowledging the Europeans’ internal divisions. She said the European Union would submit a proposal on how to resume the talks within two months.

At a lower level, delegates to the U.N. conference on climate change are supposed to meet in Bonn in May. The next full-blown negotiations aren’t scheduled before October 2001, in Marrakech, Morocco.

What future role the United States will play is pure conjecture until the question is settled of who the next president will be. But already Saturday, there were indications that some Republicans believe that the process begun in Kyoto, which built upon a 1992 world summit on the environment in Rio de Janeiro, has struck a dead end.

“I believe a new approach to dealing with the risk of climate change is necessary--one that adopts a longer-term, global perspective to emissions reductions and relies on investment in domestic and international clean-energy technology research and development,” Sen. Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement after the failure of The Hague conference.