US walks out of Climate talks as 150 nations move forward

MONTREAL - The Bush administration's unwillingness to seriously confront global warming was increasingly at odds with the rest of the world last night as more than 150 other nations were poised to move forward with the Kyoto protocol.

The US faced widespread condemnation after persistently rejecting even the mildest commitment to deal with climate change.

Former US president Bill Clinton told the meeting that the Bush administration was "flat wrong" to reject the Kyoto accord and said cutting greenhouse gases was good for business and the planet. In an impassioned speech to hundreds of delegates and nongovernmental groups, Clinton rejected a major tenet of the Bush administration's argument for pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol emissions pact in 2001.

Clinton, whose administration negotiated Kyoto in 1997 but never submitted it to a skeptical Senate for ratification, said the belief that Kyoto would hurt the economies of developed nations was incorrect. "We know from every passing year we get more and more objective data that if we had a serious, disciplined effort to apply on a large scale existing clean energy and energy conservation technologies that we could meet and surpass the Kyoto targets easily in a way that would strengthen, not weaken, our economies," he said.

The Montreal meeting is the latest in a 17-year string of sessions aimed at moving both industrial powers and fast-growing developing countries toward cutting emissions of the greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide, which are an unavoidable byproduct of burning
coal, oil and forests.

They have produced two agreements. The first, the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), was accepted by nearly all the world's countries, including the United States, but includes no binding targets and never defines an unacceptably dangerous concentration
of greenhouse gases.

The Kyoto Protocol, an addendum to the first treaty, took effect in February but only requires about three dozen industrial countries to make cuts in the gases. It was rejected in 2001 by President Bush.

At the Montreal meeting on Friday, countries bound by the Kyoto pact were close to agreeing on a plan to negotiate a new set of targets and timetables for cutting emissions after its terms expire in 2012.