Bush’s target date to halt growth of gas emissions fails to impress

It’s too little too late, leaders in the international community said.

PARIS (AP) — President Bush has finally set a target date for reining in U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases but the plan is falling flat in the international arena, where critics have long accused him of not moving quickly enough on tackling global warming.

“Losership instead of leadership,” Germany’s environment minister said Thursday of Bush’s new strategy. A major disappointment, South Africa said. Too little and too late, a Chinese official added.

Bush’s speech Wednesday, in which he said the U.S. must stop the growth of its emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases by 2025, dominated U.S.-sponsored climate talks in Paris involving the world’s major economies.

Beyond the buzz over Bush, negotiators at the closed-door meeting pushed ways to expand the production of biofuels from sources beyond corn and other food crops, the chief French delegate said. The growing use of biofuels is blamed in part for grain shortages and rising food prices that have caused recent riots in several countries.

Bush’s speech hung like a shadow over all the discussions.

Since Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, many nations have viewed him as an obstacle to the fight against global warming, which scientists say is worsened by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Bush argued that the risks of climate change weren’t clear and that the Kyoto pact’s mandatory emissions cuts for industrialized nations would hurt the U.S. economy while not covering rapidly growing economic competitors such as China and India.

Over the past year or so, Bush has gradually acknowledged the dangers of planetary warming, amid increasingly alarming studies about human-caused carbon emissions. His White House address Wednesday marked the first time he set a specific target date for reductions in U.S. emissions.

American environmentalists and congressional Democrats criticized the Bush plan for not setting an earlier deadline for curbing emissions, and his speech was widely viewed elsewhere as being out of touch with the rest of the world.

Bush is “lagging hopelessly behind the problems with his proposals,” German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said in a statement in Berlin.

“His speech follows the motto: ‘losership instead of leadership,’” Gabriel said. “We are glad that there are other voices in the USA.”

In Paris, Chinese delegate Su Wei said it was good news that Bush was talking about emissions. But he joined critics in saying the U.S. needs to cut its emissions — not just limit their growth.

“We think the United States should already have cut emissions,” Su said, because that would have encouraged other countries to follow the lead of the world’s biggest economy.

China’s emissions have soared with its economic boom and it rivals the U.S. as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. But China and other developing nations say they should not be saddled with binding cuts when their per-capita emissions are much below those in rich countries.