NYT: Bush to clash with Europe on greenhouse reductions

NYT: Bush to clash with Europe on greenhouse reductions

RAW STORYPublished: Friday May 25, 2007

President Bush is set to clash with European allies who are pushing for deep long-term cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, according to an article that will run on the front page of tomorrow's New York Times.

"In unusually harsh language, Bush administration negotiators took issue with the German draft of the communique for the summit meeting of the Group of 8 industrialized nations," reported the Times, "complaining that the proposal 'crosses multiple red lines in terms of what we simply cannot agree to.'"

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"We have tried to tread lightly but there is only so far we can go given our fundamental opposition to the German position," the U.S. response said.

Germany, backed by Britain and Japan, has proposed cutting global greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who will be host of the summit meeting in the Baltic Sea resort of Heiligendamm next month, has been pushing hard to get the Group of 8 to take significant action on climate change.

It had been a foregone conclusion that the Western European members of the Group of 8 -- Germany, Italy, France and Britain -- would back the reductions. But on Thursday, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan threw his lot in with the Europeans, and proposed cutting carbon emissions as part of a new framework to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
"The Kyoto Protocol was the first, concrete step for the human race to tackle global warming, but we must admit that it has limitations," Abe said at a conference in Tokyo. He specifically called on the United States and China, the world's two biggest producers of carbon emissions, to take the lead in the fight against global warming.
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