BALI, Indonesia - The United States will come up with its own plan to cut global-warming gases by mid-2008, and won't commit to mandatory caps at the UN climate conference in Bali, the chief US negotiator said yesterday.
"We're not ready to do that here," said Harlan Watson, the State Department's senior climate negotiator and special representative. "We're working on that, what our domestic contribution would be, and again we expect that sometime before the end of the major economies process."
That process of US-led talks was inaugurated last September by President Bush, who invited 16 other "major economies" such as the Europeans, Japan, China, and India, to Washington to discuss a future international program of cutbacks in carbon dioxide and other emissions blamed for global warming.
Environmentalists accuse the Bush administration of using those parallel talks to subvert the long-running UN negotiations and the spirit of the binding Kyoto Protocol, which requires 36 industrial nations to make relatively modest cuts in "greenhouse" gases.
Demonstrations and rallies were held in more than 50 major cities around the world yesterday to coincide with the two-week UN Climate Change Conference, which runs through Friday. Hundreds marched outside the conference center in Bali.
Activists at Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. took part in the National Polar Bear Plunge, one of several such events from New England to Fairbanks, Alaska, yesterday.
In Taipei, Taiwan, about 1,500 people marched through the streets holding banners and placards saying "No to carbon dioxide." At a Climate Rescue Carnival held in a park in Auckland, New Zealand, more than 350 people lay on the grass to spell out "Climate SOS."
In the Philippine capital, Manila, hundreds of people joined a costume parade, with some wearing miniature windmills on their hats or framing their faces in cardboard cutouts of the sun.
At the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, ice sculpture artist Christian Funk carved a polar bear out of 15 tons of ice as a memorial to climate protection. Christmas markets throughout Germany switched off their lights for five minutes.
In London, British cyclists pedaled into Parliament Square, and about 2,000 people marched in the rain past Parliament to rally outside the US embassy. About 1,000 people joined a march in Stockholm. Fire-eaters blew flames at a rally in Athens.
The United States is the only major industrial country to have rejected Kyoto and its obligatory targets. The US leadership instead favors a more voluntary approach, in which individual nations determine what they can contribute to a global effort, without taking on obligations under the UN climate treaty.
