Conservationists with low expectations for President Bush´s global warming gathering at the White House Thursday and Friday organized their own parallel summit to keep momentum churning toward a United Nations solution to climate change.

Frustrated by what their leader labeled Bush´s "sidelight," the National Environmental Trust invited climate change experts from at least a dozen countries to participate. The U.N. Foundation and the Royal Institute of International Affairs coordinated the two-day meeting with NET.

"This is an opportunity for non-governmental advocates to collaborate and strategize à as we go forward to Bali," a NET spokesman said in a Thursday interview. "We don´t know what´s going on at the White House because it´s going on behind closed doors."

At the G-8 summit in June, the United States blocked an effort by the eight industrialized nations to slice carbon dioxide emissions in half by 2050, from 1990 levels. Bush, however, vowed to bring industrialized countries and developing nations together at the White House to discuss how and how much to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Major polluters on the invite list are China, Russia, India, Japan, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Italy, Mexico, South Africa, Indonesia, France, Brazil and Australia. Representatives of the European Union and the United Nations also attended.

NET president Philip Clapp called the meeting "a sidelight, not a process that leads to anything. You´re seeing the Bush administration make this up as they go along."

Environmental organizations and European environmental officials fear the White House meetings will short-circuit the momentum growing as world leaders prepare for post-Kyoto Protocol discussions on reducing emissions this December in Bali, Indonesia. They are calling for mandatory measures, not the voluntary ones Bush promotes. The Kyoto pact, which the United States refused to sign, expires in five years.

White House officials have acknowledged that figuring out how to reduce heat-trapping gases worldwide is not a challenge to be solved in two days. But they claim they are not trying to derail the U.N. treaty process.

"It´s our philosophy that each nation has the sovereign capacity to decide for itself what its own portfolio of policies should be," said James Connaughton, the president´s chief environmental adviser.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who met with European environmental officials earlier this week, said Bush´s rhetoric has improved but his results still fall short.

"I call on President Bush to finally embrace the tools we need to get the job done," said the chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, adding that the answer is "cap-and-trade and mandatory caps on global warming pollution."

 

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