LONDON - The United States said on Friday it is not convinced of the need to move quickly to combat climate change, deepening environmentalists' fears that a summit on the issue in July will make no concrete progress.
President George W.Bush's chief climate negotiator Harlan Watson told BBC radio: "We are still not convinced of the need to move forward quite so quickly."
"There is general agreement that there is a lot known, but also there is a lot to be known."
His declaration came less than two months before a G8 summit which has tackling climate change at the top of its agenda.
Katherine Pearce of Friends of the Earth said the news exposed the bitter row taking place behind closed doors.
"Everybody knows that in private US negotiators are saying they are not convinced of the need for action, but for Harlan Watson to say it publicly today is pretty devastating really," she told Reuters.
Scientists have warned that the world could warm by two degrees Centigrade by the end of the century, raising the spectre of more droughts and floods and rising sea levels, putting millions of lives at risk.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has the presidency this year of the Group of Eight rich industrial nations, has said climate change is taking place and being exacerbated by human activities like transport and electricity generation.
He has made it a point of principle that the summit at the Gleneagles golf course in Scotland from July 6-8 should come up with a blueprint for action.
But the United States, which has refused to sign up to the Kyoto protocol on cutting emissions of the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, has dug in its heels at every turn.
"The real danger will be a communique that is all hot air with no substance." Pearce said. "It will count as a huge missed opportunity."
Richard Tarasofsky, head of sustainable development at the Royal Institute for International Affairs, said part of the problem was that agreeing on action would automatically expose how big the problem was and how little had so far been done.
"The implications of the adaptation agenda are huge and so to try to foster clear international responses will actually be quite difficult," he said. "It will be quite murky."
To make matters worse -- at least for environmentalists, nuclear power has leaped back onto the agenda as a clean and quick fix.
Bush has announced a major push for nuclear power and even Blair has linked the two.
"There can't be a debate on climate change without a serious consideration of it," he told reporters on Thursday.
Story by Jeremy Lovell
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
