Montreal: Bushcorps Temper Tantrum, World Sighs

Bush Delegation Stages “Walk Out” at Climate Talks from Think Progress

Not content with simply remaining outside the international agreements on climate change, the Bush administration is now trying to block other countries from making progress without it.

The American delegation staged a dramatic walkout last night in a bid to scuttle the entire U.N. climate change conference in Montreal. The theatrics were billed as a protest of Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin’s harmless remarks from Wednesday. (Martin said, “To the reticent nations, including the United States, I say there is such a thing as a global conscience, and now is the time to listen to it.”)

Compounding the embarassment, the U.S. delegation actually had to first walk in to the negotiations before they could “walk out,” because they hadn’t been regularly attending the meetings.

U.S. frustrations aren’t based in substance: the U.S. delegation rejected language that was lifted directly from the G8 communiqué that President Bush himself signed in July. Rather, the problem is that this week’s negotiations reinforced that the Bush administration is more isolated than ever in dealing with global climate change. Simply put, the U.S. delegation recognizes that the rest of the world is making progress, and it is pulling out all the stops in order to keep that from happening.

Later: “Bush-administration officials privately threatened organizers of the U.N. Climate Change Conference, telling them that any chance there might’ve been for the United States to sign on to the Kyoto global-warming protocol would be scuttled if they allowed Bill Clinton to speak at the gathering today in Montreal, according to a source involved with the negotiations who spoke to New York Magazine on condition of anonymity.”

from Clinton Says Bush Is 'Flat Wrong' on Kyoto AP

Delegates from around the world worked into the final hours of a U.N. climate conference on Friday to produce a plan for deeper cuts after 2012 in greenhouse-gas emissions, buoyed by a last-minute message of support from former President Clinton.

Clinton, in an applause-filled appearance at the Montreal meeting, said President Bush was "flat wrong" to claim that reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to fight global warming would damage the U.S. economy. But the ex-president urged the negotiators from more than 180 nations to find a way to "work with" the current U.S. administration.

Throughout the two-week conference, the Bush administration repeatedly rejected Canadian and other efforts to draw it into future global talks on emission controls, just as in 2001 it renounced the existing Kyoto Protocol and its mandatory cuts.

Despite Clinton's message, many here seemed resigned to waiting for a political change in Washington.

"It's such a pity the United States is still very much unwilling to join the international community, to have a multilateral effort to deal with climate change," said the leader of the African group of nations here, Kenya's Emily Ojoo Massawa.

"The administration just doesn't seem to get it. They don't understand the world is suffering from climate change," said Jennifer Morgan of the environmentalist group Climate Action Network.

Negotiations among the more than 150 nations that ratified Kyoto went on until dawn Friday and then resumed later in the day, as they hammered out final details of a plan whereby a working group would begin developing post-2012 proposals. The tentative document included no deadline for that work, but said it should be completed early enough to ensure that no gap develops after 2012.