Yesterday's agreement was not a "foothold," said climate negotiator Michael Zammit Cutajar, a Maltese diplomat. "It's a finger-hold, like hanging on by your nails."
The annual climate conference approved a seminar next May, as proposed by the European Union, but one at which governments can only informally raise a range of issues, including next steps on control of carbon-dioxide and other emissions blamed for warming.
"The only thing we want to discuss is future options, and we will," said a key EU negotiator, Pieter van Geel, the Dutch environment secretary.
For their part, the Americans avoided any commitment to formally negotiate mandatory reductions in emissions, the idea Bush rejected in 2001, when he renounced Kyoto. Bush said Kyoto would harm the US economy and complained that China, India, and other poorer but industrializing nations were exempt from the 1997 pact's short-term goals.
Even this US-European compromise, brought to the open floor for routine adoption at the end of the two-week conference, was stalled for hours yesterday morning by India, China, and others.
"Developing countries and the US didn't want to see a wider opening for new commitments," Chinese delegate Gao Feng said. With Argentina's mediation, new language was inserted on the floor saying the seminar "does not open any negotiation leading to new commitments."
If the Europeans or others at next year's seminar launch discussions about a future treaty framework, US diplomats will probably ignore them. "We think it's premature," the US delegation head, Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky, said last week.
Carbon dioxide, a byproduct of automobile engines, power plants, and other fossil fuel-burning industries, traps heat that otherwise would escape the atmosphere. A broad scientific consensus, endorsed by a UN-sponsored network of climatologists, holds that most of the past century's global temperature rise -- 1 degree Fahrenheit -- was probably caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
