Global warming talks end without deal

OTTAWA, Canada (Reuters) -- The United States and Europe failed Thursday to bridge major differences after two days of talks aimed at salvaging a pact to curb global warming.

Officials from both sides stressed they had made some progress in closing the gap between the European Union and the so-called "umbrella group" of the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

But they also made it clear that significant differences still remain over how best to cut emissions of "greenhouse gases," believed by many scientists to be responsible for the global warming trend, and how to meet promises of emission cuts hatched at a 1997 meeting in Kyoto, Japan.

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"Much remains to be done," U.S. Assistant Secretary of State David Sandalow told reporters as he left the Ottawa meeting. His comments were echoed by the EU side.

"There is certainly a big gap to be bridged between us and the umbrella group of countries," said James Currie, the European Union's director-general for the environment.

The meeting was the first time the two sides had made contact since last month's dramatic collapse of U.N.-sponsored talks in The Hague to set a global strategy on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

It is now up to member governments to decide what to do next. EU officials had said before the Ottawa talks that if the two sides could be brought close enough together, it might well pave the way for a meeting of ministers in Oslo next week.

But Canadian Environment Minister David Anderson, when asked whether he thought there would be a meeting in Oslo, replied: "That would be unlikely."

Canadian delegation head Alan Nymark was slightly more upbeat than Anderson, saying the two sides had narrowed the number of issues that separated them.

"Whether (ministers) feel the circumstances are right for a meeting before Christmas depends on several different continents coming to that conclusion in a relatively short period of time. That's quite a large task," he said.

Anderson is one of the ministers who will decide whether a meeting should be held next week.

"It would have been nice to get the officials to hammer out an agreement, but that has not happened. That's the bad news," Anderson told Reuters by telephone from Washington after conferring with officials participating in the talks.

"The good news is that there was a general agreement to move ahead, a clear desire to move ahead from (where we were) at The Hague."

The two sides disagree over Washington's insistence that countries be allowed to offset carbon dioxide absorbed by forests and farmlands against pollution reduction targets agreed in Kyoto.

At The Hague, the EU rejected a last-minute compromise that would have allowed limited use of such "carbon sinks" but in Ottawa the 15-nation bloc gave an indication it might be softening its position.

"We accept the idea with conditions, and the conditions are really limiting the scale...but of course it's not an agreement now because we did not agree on (anything) at this stage," said French representative Laurence Tubiana.

The EU wants countries to cut their emissions rather than buy reduction credits from other countries.

Signatories to the Kyoto agreement were supposed to set detailed rules to meet a target of cutting emissions to 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012.

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UN Convention on Climate Change
  • The Convention and the Kyoto Protocol
European Union

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