An EU delegation which includes the Environment Commissioner, Ms Margot Wallstrom, the Swedish Environment Minister and Belgium's Energy Minister will arrive in Washington today to seek clarification of the US position on climate change following the Bush administration's repudiation last week of the Kyoto Protocol.
The Swedish Environment Minister, Mr Kjell Larsson, said yesterday that supporters of the protocol were in "a morally very strong position".
But Mr Bush has already ignored appeals from the Commission President, the Swedish Prime Minister and the German Chancellor to change his mind.
Later in the week the delegation will travel to China, Russia, Iran and Japan. Meanwhile, the Dutch Environment Minister, Mr Jan Pronk, who heads the United Nations panel for climate change, urged the EU to give the Bush administration time to work out its policy on global warming.
He was speaking after a meeting of EU environment ministers in the northern Swedish town of Kiruna.
The ministers expressed outrage at the US move, and Mr Larsson, who chaired the meeting, insisted the Kyoto Protocol remained alive.
"No individual state has the right to declare a multilateral treaty dead," he said.
The ministers promised to press ahead with ratifying the climate change deal with or without the US.
Mr Pronk declined to give details of his compromise proposals, which he will present at a meeting of environment ministers in New York on April 21st. But he expressed confidence that it would be more acceptable to the US than proposals presented at a climate change conference in The Hague last year.
"It's an ambitious package with perhaps a greater chance to be accepted. It is my intention to do my best to keep the family together," he said.
The Kyoto Protocol binds industrialised states to cut their emissions of carbon dioxide, which are believed to cause climate change.
But Mr Pronk said yesterday the treaty's target of cutting emissions by 2012 to 5.2 per cent less than 1990 levels was just the beginning of the battle against global warming.
He said scientists believed emissions must decline by as much as 60 per cent over the next 50 years.
The Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, hopes the Bush administration can be pressurised by the international community into implementing the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
If the EU's critical response to President Bush's announcement failed to bring about a reversal of policy, Mr Dempsey said, it could mean an increase in the level of pain Irish people would have to bear as measures to limit carbon-dioxide emissions were put into effect by the Government.
Because of rapid economic growth, this State has already exceeded the target emissions for 2002 set by the Kyoto Protocol, which was a 13 per cent increase on 1990 levels.
Late last year Mr Dempsey published plans designed to cut back on the production of carbon dioxide through agriculture, industry and traffic.