Nations Agree to Binding Climate Talks

The Kyoto participants' agreement to pursue a new round of emission limits amounted to a bet that the United States will change its position once President Bush leaves office, participants said.

 "We can't have an effective global regime without the U.S., but we can move ahead with the discussion about what the regime will be with everyone else at the table, leaving a seat for the U.S. and hoping the U.S. will fill its empty seat," said Michael Zammit Cutajar, Malta's ambassador for international environmental affairs, who helped oversee the initial Kyoto negotiations. "After all, things will change in the U.S. in a few years. There will be a new constellation of forces, and maybe there will be a greater readiness to engage."

The agreement among Kyoto parties both commits most of the world's most influential nations to negotiating a new set of emission cuts and forces them to evaluate at their 2006 meeting whether the current climate regime is working.

In the second, broader pact, nearly 200 countries agreed to start an informal dialogue to determine what else should be done to address climate change. This accord calls for developing nations such as China and India, which are not obligated by the Kyoto targets, to adopt voluntary emissions cuts that they could trade for credits on the international carbon market established under Kyoto.

A coalition of rain-forest nations, including Brazil, Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea, won passage of a draft plan to receive international carbon credits in exchange for preserving their rain forests. Deforestation across the globe accounts for about 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

Wari Iamo, who heads Papua New Guinea's Department of Environment and Conservation, said 30 percent of his country is under logging at the moment and his government is eager to find an alternative.

"It's important to preserve a lot of this before it disappears," said Iamo, who noted that Papua New Guinea boasts 7 percent of the world's biodiversity.

Several environmentalists said the move to bring developing countries into the carbon-trading market was nearly as important as the developed nations' agreement to press ahead with Kyoto. "This deal means that the world is now constructing a global framework to deal with climate change, not just emission reductions by industrialized nations," said Philip Clapp, president of the advocacy group National Environmental Trust.

But Margo Thorning, senior vice president for the free-market American Council for Capital Formation and managing director of the International Council on Capital Formation, said many European countries would not be able to meet their emissions targets unless they adopted "stringent new measures that the governments don't have the political will to do."

At times this week, Washington and its traditional allies seemed on the brink of divorce, especially after Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin told reporters Wednesday, "To the recalcitrant nations, including the United States, I would say this: There is such a thing as a global conscience, and now is the time to listen to it."

State Department spokesman Adam Ereli responded Friday: "If you want to talk about global consciousness, I'd say there's one country that is focused on action, that is focused on dialogue, that is focused on cooperation and is focused on helping the developing world. And that's the United States."

At one point Bush's deputies threatened to boycott the meetings if Clinton, who was invited by Montreal's mayor and the Canadian Sierra Club, spoke. Clinton offered not to come, said sources close to the former president, but the Canadians stood by the invitation.

Publicly, Paula Dobriansky, the U.S. undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs, welcomed Clinton, saying in a statement that events at the conference, "such as the one involving former President Clinton, are useful opportunities to hear a wide range of views on global climate change."