CLIMATE CHANGE: The prospect for a successful outcome to this week's UN climate change summit moved a step closer yesterday as delegates cleared the last two stumbling blocks holding up implementation of the Kyoto Protocol.
Despite US non-participation in the treaty, and its effective disengagement from the negotiations here, the conference reached agreement on how compliance with Kyoto is to be enforced and how to help poorer countries to adapt to climate change.
Saudi Arabia had been so persistently blocking progress on these issues that British environment secretary Elliott Morley named them as "villains" of the conference for making "unreasonable demands", including future compensation for declining oil revenues.
But Bill Hare, director of Greenpeace International, said the Saudis were merely "fronting" for the US, which remained the "main villain" for its opposition to any discussion of future targets to cut the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for causing climate change.
The US position was clearly spelled out by under-secretary of state Paula Dobriansky. "We firmly believe that negotiations will not reap progress", she said, adding that the US was against a "one size fits all" approach.
"We have concerns about formalised discussions that provide a basis for negotiations," she told a press conference. "We believe progress cannot be made that way and that the best way forward is by having different approaches [ to dealing with climate change]".
Ms Dobriansky listed activities undertaken by the US in promoting alternative energy at home and abroad, and stressed the importance of its new Asia-Pacific Partnership with Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea in promoting "clean development".
The partnership will be launched next month at a meeting in Australia to be attended by US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and US energy secretary Sam Bodman - significantly, a much higher-level delegation than the US sent to this week's climate summit.
But David Doniger, a former Clinton administration senior official who was directly involved in negotiating the Kyoto Protocol, dismissed the partnership initiative as "a fantasy - just an exercise in looking busy" and was equally scathing about the US role in Montreal.
"The US came ashore in these negotiations with the destructive power of a hurricane, and it's up to the other parties to decide whether it's a category 5 or a category 1," he said. "If the US delegation won't lead or follow, they just need to get out of the way."
Mr Doniger, climate policy director of the Washington-based Natural Resources Defence Council, said it was "hypocritical" of Ms Dobriansky to praise actions taken by US cities and states to reduce emissions when the federal government was "blocking" them.
"It's hard to believe that a country as big and as powerful as the US would hold its breath until it turns blue," he told The Irish Times. "But that's what is happening here. They're just not participating. All they're saying is 'what part of 'No' do you not understand?' "
But the EU and others seeking to make progress needed to remember that President George Bush now headed a "lame duck" administration and even the US senate was now calling for mandatory limits on emissions.
British environment secretary Margaret Beckett said she detected that the summit had entered a period of "false euphoria" and, based on previous experience, this was likely to give way to a period of "false despair" before an agreement was finally reached.
EU environment commissioner Stavros Dimas enjoys reading out the section of last July's G8 Gleaneagles Agreement in which its leaders - including President Bush - acknowledged the UN as "the appropriate forum for negotiating future action on climate change".