Bush invites nations to confront climate change
WASHINGTON -- President Bush invited representatives of major industrialized and developing countries to a fall climate change summit in Washington the same week that the United Nations is holding a similar conclave in New York.
"In recent years, science has deepened our understanding of climate change and opened new possibilities for confronting it," Bush said in his invitation letter Friday, asking other nations to take part in discussing a long-term strategy.
Under international pressure to take tough action against global warming, Bush last May had called for a meeting of nations to talk about how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote energy efficiency without hampering economic growth. The White House now has set the meeting for Sept. 27-28, to be hosted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Presidential spokesman Scott Stanzel dismissed a question about whether the White House conference was aimed at competing with or deflecting attention from the U.N. meeting.
"This effort is intended to aid the U.N. process that is ongoing," Stanzel said.
The meeting will address "life after" the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. The Kyoto agreement, adopted in 1997, requires 35 industrial nations to cut their global-warming emissions 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.
The United States, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is not a party to the Kyoto agreement, and large developing countries such as China, the second-largest emitter, India and Brazil are exempt from its obligations.
Bush wants to bring those nations and other fast-growing countries to the negotiating table. Their willingness is unclear, however.
The president, who plans to address the conference, also invited the European Union, the European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Australia, Indonesia, South Africa and the United Nations.
The invitation says representatives would talk about ways the major world economies would -- by the end of 2008 -- agree on a framework that could include a long-term and global, but voluntary, goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He said they also would talk about working with the private sector to promote clean energy technologies.
Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, a democrat, said the meeting will be unproductive unless Bush agrees to binding emission restrictions.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has urged all countries to reach a comprehensive agreement by 2009, which would leave time for governments to ratify the accord so it could take effect in 2013, when the Kyoto accord will have expired.
Ban is convening a high-level climate-change meeting on Sept. 24, a day before the General Assembly's annual ministerial meeting begins. This is the same week of Bush's conference.
This week, at the first-ever U.N. General Assembly meeting on climate change, the Group of 77, which represents 132 mainly developing countries and China, stressed that "climate change should be pursued within the framework of the United Nations."
"It is important to emphasize that any special events or initiatives, whether individual, national, regional or multilateral should complement ongoing negotiations" at the U.N., said Pakistan's Environment Minister Mukhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat, whose country heads the Group of 77.
U.N.-sponsored negotiations on a new global climate change accord are expected to start at a December meeting on the Indonesian island of Bali.