- MARRAKESH, Morocco (Reuters)
- U.N. climate talks on a pact to limit global warming resume Monday with
the world's main polluter, the United States, on the sidelines.
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- The two-week meeting in the southern Moroccan city will
seek to produce a legally binding document for industrialized nations to
significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade.
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- But the United States, the world's number one industrial
power and its biggest polluter, is unlikely to return to the four-year-old
pact.
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- Washington in March surprisingly pulled out of the Kyoto
Protocol created in 1997 in Japan's ancient capital, which many scientists
see as the last attempt to save the planet from the destructive impact
of climate changes they expect this century.
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- President Bush said the deal agreed by his predecessor
Bill Clinton was ``fatally flawed'' and would harm the U.S. economy.
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- The Marrakesh meeting, known as COP7 -- the seventh conference
of the parties to a U.N. treaty signed in 1992 at the first Earth Summit
in Rio de Janeiro -- is expected to tie up loose ends on the Kyoto Protocol
after countries struck a political compromise on the key issues in Bonn
in July.
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- Supporters of the pact say a legal agreement in Marrakesh
should allow countries to ratify Kyoto -- becoming legally bound by it
-- by next year.
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- The pact binds industrialized countries to cut their
emissions of greenhouse gases, which trap heat in the atmosphere and are
blamed for global warming, by an average of five percent below 1990 levels
by 2012.
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- CONFERENCE CHAIRMAN OPTIMISTIC
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- Moroccan Environment Minister Mohamed El Yazghi, who
will chair the meeting of delegates from 180 countries, was confident the
Marrakesh session would ``translate into legal text'' what was sealed at
an eleventh-hour deal in July, and ensure compliance.
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- ``I'm very optimistic because a lot of groundwork was
done in Bonn,'' he told Reuters, in reference to questions such the role
of forests in soaking up the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and what penalties
to impose on countries failing to meet agreed targets.
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- Mindful that some countries might want to backtrack on
the Bonn deal, the head of the European Union delegation, Belgian Energy
Minister Olivier Deleuze, said no door would be reopened in Morocco that
was closed in Germany.
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- ``We are not renegotiating the Kyoto Protocol,'' he told
Reuters in Brussels.
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- Some countries, reluctant to proceed without the United
States, may be tempted to wait for new proposals from Washington, but both
Yazghi and Deleuze said none should be expected.
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- The U.S. delegation would not bring any rival proposals
to Marrakesh, the soft-spoken Moroccan minister said, calling it ''a wise
decision...in order not to disrupt the agenda of the conference.''
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- SELFISH U.S.?
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- He predicted, however, that delegations would ``try and
convince'' the Americans to reverse their stand on the Kyoto Protocol.
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- Countries accounting for 55 percent of industrial nations'
carbon dioxide emissions must ratify the pact and the absence of the United
States has been particularly felt because it represents about a third of
the industrialized world's output.
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- Yazghi deplored the fact that that the leading role the
U.S. has adopted in the fight against terrorism in the wake of the September
11 attacks on its territory does not extend to the climate talks.
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- The United States' interest ``clearly is not to be isolated,''
he said. ``But they run the risk of appearing to defend only their own
interests.''
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- As the United States seeks international cooperation
in its campaign to destroy Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden 's network,
which it accuses of organizing last month's suicide airliner attacks on
New York and Washington, the Marrakesh talks would be a reminder that globalization
could have a positive side, Deleuze said.
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- ``I am not convinced (climate change) is less important
because of September 11, maybe it is even more important,'' he said.
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- Additional reporting by Robin Pomeroy in Brussels
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