Washington — The White House recently sought advice from the State Department about how the United States can legally withdraw its signature from a landmark 1997 global warming agreement, signaling its intent to pull out despite efforts by European and Japanese leaders to try to keep the agreement alive, an administration source said Tuesday.
The global warming treaty signed in Kyoto, Japan marked the first time that the world's industrial nations committed to binding limits on the heat-trapping gases that scientists believe threaten catastrophic changes in the planet's climate. Under its terms, the United States would have to reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and certain other pollutants by 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.
However, the Senate has refused to ratify the treaty, and President Bush wrote to four conservative senators March 13 that he opposed the agreement because it exempts developing countries and would harm the U.S. economy.
Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman told reporters Tuesday that the Kyoto protocol was dead as far as the administration was concerned and that if the Europeans and Japanese wanted to work out an agreement, they would have to abandon the outlines of the accord and take a different approach.
"No, we have no interest in implementing that treaty," Whitman said. "If there's a general agreement that we need to be addressing the global climate change issue, (the question is) how do we do it in a way that allows us to make some progress, instead of spending our time committed to something that isn't going to go."
The efforts by the administration to further distance the United States from the global warming accord seemed certain to stun European Union officials, who have been urging President Bush to help restart stalled talks on implementing the agreement.
No comments
Commenting is turned off for this story.