Word: kyoto
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...switch to cleaner-burning natural gas. France, for its part, never had much coal and is heavily reliant on nuclear power today. With relatively powerful Green parties and citizenries that tend to care about these things, the E.U. is almost required to take a strong pro-environment line in Kyoto...
...President has no interest in political suicide; neither does the Vice President, who, despite his concern about the environment, is not expected to attend the conference. They have sent delegates to Kyoto armed with a proposal that is much weaker than the E.U.'s. It would push emissions down to 1990 levels, and no lower, some time between 2008 and 2012. Part of that reduction would come through an international system of emissions trading, by which, say, a power company based in the U.S. could upgrade a plant in China and use reduced emissions there to meet its domestic target...
...plan has already been denounced by the Europeans. Moreover, the President has been saddled with a Senate restriction that has made his position even less tenable. Previous agreements on greenhouse-gas emissions, as well as the proposal the E.U. is bringing to Kyoto, have tried to ease the burden on such developing countries as China and India. Most of the world's emissions come from the U.S. and Europe, after all, and richer countries can more easily afford to clean...
...Senate disagreed. Swayed by economic arguments, and also by the fact that emission levels in developing nations are rising rapidly, it declared unanimously in August that it would never ratify a treaty that let developing countries avoid some sacrifices. At a pre-Kyoto workshop in Bonn in October, the so-called G77 group--77 developing nations--along with China, thumbed its collective nose at the U.S. by signing on to the European plan...
Several other countries and alliances are bringing their own proposals to Kyoto. Whether so many contentious factions can agree on anything at all is uncertain. Even if by some chance all 170 countries endorsed the toughest proposal on the table, global warming would only be slowed. "If we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today," says Clinton's science adviser, John Gibbons, "temperatures would rise another several degrees...