US officials told a UN conference on climate change that their government was doing more than most to protect the earth's atmosphere. In response, leading environmental groups blasted Washington for refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol, a global treaty that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Canada opened the 10-day UN Climate Control Conference on Monday, with about 10,000 experts from 180 nations, to brainstorm on ways to slow the effects of greenhouse gases and global warming.
The conference aims to forge new agreements on cutting poisonous emissions, considered by many scientists to be the planet's most pressing environmental issue.
Harlan Watson, senior climate negotiator for the US Department of State, said that while President George W. Bush declined to join the treaty, the US leader takes global warming seriously.
He noted greenhouse gas emissions had actually gone down by 0.8 percent under Bush.
"With regard to what the United States is doing on climate change, the actions we have taken are next to none in the world,'' Watson said on the sidelines of the conference.
Watson is leading a delegation of dozens of US officials at the conference and will be joined by US Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky next week, when 120 government ministers arrive for the high-profile final negotiations.
Watson said the US spends more than US$5 billion a year on efforts to slow the deterioration of the earth's atmosphere by supporting climate change research and technology, and that Bush had committed to cutting greenhouse gases some 18 percent by 2012.
Elizabeth May of the Sierra Club Canada, however, accused the world's biggest polluter of trying to derail the Kyoto accord.
"We have a lot of positive, constructive American engagement here in Montreal -- and none of it's from the Bush administration, which represents the single biggest threat to global progress," May said, adding that Washington had "continually tried to derail" the Kyoto process.
The US, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, saying it would harm the US economy and is flawed by the lack of restrictions on emissions by emerging economic powers such as China and India.
In the first ever meeting of all 140 signatories of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, Canada's Environment Minister Stephane Dion and president of the 11th UN Framework Convention on Climate Control described climate change as "the greatest environment hazard" facing mankind.
The Kyoto accord calls on the top 35 industrialized nations to cut emissions by 5.2 percent below their 1990 levels by 2012.
The conference will set agreements on how much more emissions should be cut after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol expires, though signatories are already falling short of their targets.
Canada is up there with Spain, Ireland, Greece and five other nations as having the highest gas emissions.
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