UNITED NATIONS (AFP) — On the heels of a UN summit hailed as kickstarting the world campaign against climate change, the focus now shifts to US-led meetings on global warming where President George W. Bush faces entrenched suspicion about his motives.
The talks in Washington on Thursday and Friday, gathering the world's 16 biggest polluting economies, were called by Bush in the face of ratcheting pressure at home and abroad to beef up US action against global warming.
Bush will address the meeting -- something he did not do at the UN climate summit on Monday -- and has appointed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to chair it.
It will seek to clarify national goals for tackling greenhouse-gas emissions, encourage cleaner technologies, spur the private sector and identify industries that could be coaxed into the global carbon-cleanup.
The process will wrap up at the end of 2008, after four or five meetings throughout next year.
Given Bush's six-year-long hostility to the UN's Kyoto Protocol, suspicions are rife within the UN and among Kyoto's European and environmentalist defenders that the Washington initiative may carry a dark sub-text.
Despite US protestations to the contrary, the fears are that Bush will peddle an agenda for fast-track voluntary curbs among a small club of polluters, thus undermining the global forum, which moves at glacial speed but sets much tougher goals.
"There are obvious temptations here, but we expect the EU [European Union] to be vigilant," a Western European diplomat told AFP, adding "there is no support from the developing countries either" for ditching the UN framework.
Apparently unwilling to give Bush too much limelight, some EU countries will be sending only junior ministers or senior officials to Washington rather than ranking ministers, other European sources said.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon, encapsulating what was said in Monday's summit, said he had heard "a clear call from world leaders for a breakthrough" at an upcoming conference in Bali, Indonesia in December 3-14.
That forum is tasked with mapping out a negotiation path, under the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), for accelerating emissions cuts when Kyoto's first phase runs out in 2012.
In a veiled warning to Washington, Ban declared: "All other processes or initiatives should be compatible with the UNFCCC process and should feed into it, facilitating its successful conclusion."
Hans Verolme, director of WWF's climate change program, said the emitters invited to Washington were keen to attend "as they want to re-engage the US" after six years in which the world's largest polluter has remained outside the climate fold.
"The solid consensus, though, is that the UN is the only show in town," he said.
The UN summit gathered 150 nations, of which more than 80 were represented by head of state or government, making it the most senior gathering on climate change in United Nations history.
Ban spelled out several areas of consensus for work at Bali but also pointed to the biggest bone of contention: how ambitious the emissions cuts could be.
European nations called for the world to halve global emissions by 2050 compared with 1990 levels in order to peg warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
But this found no echo among the emerging giants of India and China, which are poised to be the big polluters of tomorrow, and Rice made no mention in her speech about any target or timetable.
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