U.S. Near Agreement to Join Climate Talks

December 9, 2005

Filed at 10:08 p.m. ET

MONTREAL (AP) -- After two contentious weeks, the United States neared agreement with an array of other countries late Friday to join in global talks about possible new steps to combat climate change, the chief U.S. negotiator said.

"We're getting very close. I'm quite confident we will have a successful outcome," Harlan Watson told The Associated Press as the U.N. climate conference entered its final hours.

Any agreement would probably be only a small step forward, however, by a Bush administration that for days resisted Canadian and other efforts to draw it into multilateral talks on mandatory reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions in the period after 2012. President Bush three years ago renounced the Kyoto Protocol, which mandates such cuts before 2012, saying they would damage the U.S. economy.

Delegates were buoyed earlier in the day by an appearance by former President Clinton, a Kyoto supporter, who told them in a speech punctuated by enthusiastic applause that Bush's economic argument is "flat wrong."

But the ex-president urged the negotiators to find a way to "work with" the current U.S. administration.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Climate-Change-Clinton.html

The current administration will go on its own agenda regardless of whatever and as long as it will be allowed to do so. Period. It follows that the more leeway you give it, the more you forward its agenda. Simple as that.

in ALL of our best interests, yet the US has to be negotiated with to attend? I just don't get it.

in the talks. That will get the headlines. Once join they will be stall, degreade, etc etc. sickening.