G-8 ministers brace for the heat in climate talks

G-8 ministers brace for the heat in climate talks

TRIESTE, Italy (Reuters): Environment ministers from the world's leading industrialized nations get down to the heated issue of climate change on Saturday as the threat of demonstrations hang over the talks.

After preliminary sessions which have allowed G-8 partners to gauge the new Bush administration's attitude towards the environment, ministers will get to the nitty-gritty of global warming, which last year provoked the collapse of key talks.

While no definitive decisions are expected to be taken at Trieste, ministers are keen to close the wide negotiating gap left after the United States and the European Union fell out at a UN-backed conference in The Hague last November.

Trieste is the first time ministers have met since The Hague, which tried to move the world forward on implementing a critical 1997 agreement, and they must try to mend their differences before another summit begins on July 16 in Bonn.

But comments from President George W. Bush's chief environment official on Friday suggested there may still be a lot of ground to cover before the parties can move on with implementing 1997's accord agreed in Kyoto, Japan.

That is likely to unsettle environmental campaigners who are looking for early, firm commitments on implementing Kyoto. And it may also heighten the wrath of anti-globalization protesters who threaten to demonstrate against the summit.

Bush's environment chief Christine Todd Whitman said on Friday the United States planned to completely review the Democrats' stance on global warming before reentering international climate talks in Bonn.

Whitman, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said Bush would not automatically offer the same compromises the Clinton camp hammered out with European countries at The Hague.

Obligation

She told reporters the U.S. government felt no obligation to return to a compromise on cutting pollution that was nearly agreed at The Hague in accordance with the Kyoto agreement.

Canada, a G-8 member allied with the United States in its reluctance to agree to the measures laid down at Kyoto, said it thought the EU faced a tougher battle to convince the United States to give ground now that Bush was in office.

Under the deal struck in Kyoto, the world's industrialized nations agreed to trim their emissions of the pollution blamed for trapping heat inside the earth's atmosphere -- so-called greenhouse gases -- by more than five percent by 2010.

But most countries are refusing to ratify the deal until rules on how to implement the cuts are in place.

With scientists predicting up to a six percent increase in average world temperatures over the next 100 years, and possible disastrous effects on sea levels and disease, environmentalists see Kyoto as the best chance to save the planet.

While ministers weigh those issues, and also plan for the environmental summit of the decade in Johannesburg next year, demonstrators will be gathering on the streets of Trieste.

Anti-globalization protests are planned for Saturday and Sunday and have been advertised on the Internet by radical environmental, human rights and Marxist groups.