EU Ministers Bash Bush, Agree to Pursue Global Warming Pact

KIRUNA, Sweden —  European environment ministers said Saturday that the Kyoto global warming treaty is still “alive” and that they will go forward with ratification plans--with or without the United States.

The ministers, who gathered in this city 90 miles above the Arctic Circle, condemned President Bush’s rejection of mandatory reductions of carbon dioxide emissions called for under the 1997 climate treaty.

Bush said Thursday that the compulsory reductions were too harmful to the U.S. economy.

“The Kyoto protocol is still alive, contrary to what has been said from the other side of the Atlantic, where one has tried to declare the Kyoto protocol dead,” Swedish Environment Minister Kjell Larsson said. “No individual country has the right to declare a multilateral agreement dead.”

Negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, the treaty calls for countries to agree to legally binding targets for curbing heat-trapping greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.

Larsson is leading an EU delegation to Washington on Monday to appeal directly to Bush administration officials to change their position.

Critics have said a U.S. withdrawal would probably doom the pact.

“Of course it will be weaker if the country with the highest per capita emissions is not participating,” Larsson said. “But we have an obligation, a responsibility, to go on with this protocol.”