- Governments from around the world [Saturday] narrowly
succeeded in keeping the international bid to combat catastrophic global
warming alive, in the face of determined attempts by the re-elected Bush
administration to kill it off.
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- Top negotiators described the effort - at a special UN
conference in Buenos Aires - as like hanging on to a cliff face by their
"fingernails", as the United States and oil-producing countries
threw rock after rock to try to dislodge them.
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- More than 36 hours after the conference was supposed
to have ended - following two all-night negotiating sessions, and while
workmen were physically dismantling the facilities around them - delegates
finally agreed on a series of compromises that avoided complete breakdown
and kept some life in the negotiations.
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- The US said that "on balance" it was "very
pleased with the outcome", but its obdurate obstruction of even anodyne
proposals at the two-week conference bodes ill for the future of the talks,
which are designed to hammer out the next tough steps to be taken after
the Kyoto Protocol runs its course in 2012.
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- It will also sharply increase the pressure on Tony Blair,
who has committed himself to making progress on combating global warming
- and involving the US in the effort - one of the key priorities for his
leadership of the G8 group of the world's most powerful countries next
year. Even before the cliff-hanger conference, Downing Street was increasingly
at a loss about how it was going to fulfil the worldwide expectations raised
by the Prime Minister in two high-profile speeches this year on what he
describes as "long term, the single most important issue facing the
global community".
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- The US performance in Buenos Aires appears to fly in
the face of a commitment given by President Bush in 2001, when he announced
that the US would withdraw from the protocol that it had previously played
a key part in negotiating. In the face of international outrage, he said
then that even though it was pulling out, the US would do nothing to obstruct
other countries trying to reach agreement. By and large it has kept to
this position since, at least in public, believing that the protocol was
doomed without its participation.
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- But this autumn Washington was shocked and angered when
Russia agreed to ratify the protocol - completing the number of countries
needed, under its complex rules, to bring it into force. Environmentalists
say that the re-elected Bush administration has decided to do everything
it can to sabotage any further international measures, and is not concerned
about the international condemnation it will incur in the process.
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- This transformed the Buenos Aires conference, which was
expected to be a routine and relatively uncontroversial meeting, the last
before negotiations on the follow-up to Kyoto begin in earnest next November.
Its chairman, Raul Estrada-Oyuela, an Argentinian diplomat who played a
central role in the negotiation of the protocol seven years ago, proposed
an apparently inoffensive series of informal meetings over next year to
prepare the ground for the talks.
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- But this was vigorously opposed by the US, which insisted
there could only be one informal meeting, and that no ideas for the future
could be discussed at it. The Americans also objected to mentions of the
need to tackle global warming as opposed to adapting to it, and backed
an extraordinary demand from Saudi Arabia that oil-producing states should
receive billions of dollars in compensation from the rest of the world
if they burned less oil.
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- Eventually a single meeting that could discuss the future
was agreed for next May, and other uneasy compromises were reached, preventing
total breakdown. "It is a finger-hold, like hanging on by your nails,"
says Michael Zammit Cutajar, a veteran climate negotiator for Malta who
was for 11 years executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on
Climate Change.
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=594502
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