U.S. Won't Join in Binding Climate Talks

European delegates said they became convinced over the course of the conference that they could move ahead on climate change because so many Americans -- including state and local officials, senators, students and even former president Bill Clinton -- journeyed to Montreal to urge negotiators to embark on a new round of binding talks.

"Just because the Bush administration doesn't want this doesn't mean the rest of the world doesn't see this as the right thing to do. What is apparent here is the U.S. is very split on this," Danish negotiator Eva Jensen said. She said Clinton's speech Friday extolling the economic and social benefits of cutting greenhouse gases "gives the world the idea that even though the U.S. at the moment isn't being very constructive in the negotiations, this might change over time."

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, whose city won a major global environmental award last week for cutting its greenhouse gas emissions by more than 5 percent in the past three years, said state and local officials are "basically leaving the administration in the dust. The next administration will have little choice but to finally work in collaboration with the rest of the international community."

But several negotiators said they had to do a better job of enlisting the United States' aid in cutting the use of fossil fuels. Corrado Clini, director general of the Italian Ministry of Environment and Territory, said that even if the European Union meets its Kyoto targets in 2012, global emissions would be reduced by less than 2 percent.

"I don't think, without a partnership between the European Union and the United States, we will be able to address climate change," Clini said. "It is like a marriage. The real risk is we are aging before the marriage, and when we marry, it will be too late to be effective."

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) was even more skeptical of Saturday's pact, saying it would lead only to "a dead end economically."

"Two weeks of costly deliberation only resulted in an agreement to deliberate some more, so Montreal was essentially a meeting about the next meeting," Inhofe said in a statement. "The Kyoto Protocol . . . is a complete failure."

As tenuous as Saturday's agreements may appear, they almost did not happen at all. The U.S. delegation, which did not return calls or e-mails Saturday, balked until late Friday night at the prospect of engaging in even nonbinding climate change talks. And Russia almost derailed the pact on future negotiations about mandatory emissions cuts when it proposed language that would have established a specific way for countries to count voluntary emission cuts as part of the binding agreement.

In the end, negotiators agreed on language that showed how far apart the two camps remain. Climate policy expert Myron Ebell at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute called the decision to move forward with a binding agreement "a futile exercise." Environmentalist Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, called Montreal "the tipping point. This is when the world got serious about dealing with this issue."