US resisting overtures on climate change talks: participants

Montreal (Platts)--7Dec2005

Efforts to open discussions between the US and other nations attending
the UN Climate Change conference here are being hampered by US resistance to
being drawn into any "process," according to environmentalists and a minister
attending the talks.

     EU delegation leader and UK Secretary of State for Environment Margaret
Beckett said Wednesday that despite the US having signed the Gleneagles
Declaration at the G8 meeting this summer, "it is no less incumbent on the US
than any other member of the convention to play their role in the discussions
that are taking place here." The G8 nations undertook at Gleneagles "to work
together to advance the goals and objectives to inform the work of the UN 
Climate Change conference in Montreal," Beckett said.

     Beckett added that "[the US is] very cautious about the commitments they
enter into. It is for them rather than for us to steer the way between their
commitment under the Gleneagles declaration and their understandable and clear
desire to be sure that they are not entering into negotiations."

     The US rejected a proposal earlier this week from conference president
and Canadian environment minister Stephane Dion to undertake a dialogue on
future commitments under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on
Climate Change, of which the US is a member. Environment groups reacted with
disappointment to what they viewed as a weak and meaningless proposal, and
urged member states to continue negotiating the future of the Kyoto Protocol,
which the US rejected in 2001.

     Responding to reporters' questions, Beckett said she was "very wary of
the approach that says 'let's forget about the Americans, because there may be
regime change at some point. There's a lot of discussion taking place in the
US. They participated at Gleneagles. We hope this will continue.'" 

     Beckett applauded the US initiative to develop technology-based responses
to climate change in the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Climate Change, which it
announced earlier this year. "It sounds like a worthwhile initiative, but it
is confined to the countries of the Asia-Pacific," she said.

			--Alessandro Vitelli, alessandro_vitelli@platts.com

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