WASHINGTON – A move Thursday by Russia that essentially triggers a 1997 international treaty to combat global warming probably will isolate the United States on a key environmental issue.

Some experts fear that European nations will try to punish America economically for opting out of the treaty.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Cabinet on Thursday approved the controversial Kyoto Protocol, which requires industrial nations to reduce emissions of gases that cause global warming to below what they were in 1990. Those gases, mostly carbon dioxide, come chiefly from burning fossil fuels and are emitted heavily by cars and coal-fired power plants.

Proponents see the treaty, negotiated by the Clinton administration seven years ago and rejected in 2001 by the Bush administration, as a small first step in controlling global warming. Opponents, including the Bush administration, say joining in could damage the United States’ coal- and oil-based economy.

The United States and Australia are the only industrial nations that aren’t ratifying the treaty.

“It basically is not going to change what we’re doing,” Harlan Watson, the State Department’s senior climate negotiator, told Knight Ridder on Thursday. “We made it clear that we’re not joining Kyoto. If other countries want to pursue that route, it’s certainly up to them.”

Critics of the administration’s go-slow policy on global warming said this would hurt America.

“The U.S. stands out in the cold,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University professor of geosciences and international affairs. “This is one of the biggest problems the world is going to face, and the U.S. doesn’t have a policy.”

European nations – which will have to pay for pollution controls to reduce their emissions – may try to punish American companies – which won’t have to – with a tariff on U.S. goods, said William Moomaw, the director of the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Tufts University. That could damage U.S. exports and America’s economy, he said.

Watson acknowledged that some Europeans are discussing tariffs, but the Bush administration isn’t taking it seriously at this point.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce Vice President Bill Kovacs said the tariffs probably wouldn’t survive a legal challenge and that most countries that signed the treaty probably wouldn’t be able to reduce emissions as required.

Russia’s approval – after ratification by the Parliament, considered a rubber stamp for Putin – will put the treaty into effect in 90 days. It’s been in limbo because it required industrialized countries that account for 55 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions to ratify it. Russia puts it over the threshold.

The United States is the biggest carbon-dioxide polluter, with one-quarter of global emissions.

The treaty requires industrial nations that approved it to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by varying amounts by 2012. Developing countries, including China and India, can keep increasing carbon-dioxide emissions.

If America had signed on, it would’ve had to reduce emissions to 7 percent below its 1990 levels. In 2002, the United States was 11.5 percent above 1990 levels.

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The treaty is “a first step in the right direction, and I think it’s too bad the U.S. is not also taking steps in the right direction,” said former Clinton chief treaty negotiator Eileen Claussen, who’s now president of the Pew Center for Global Climate Change in Washington.

Scientists say global warming is the biggest environmental problem the world faces.

Global temperatures have increased dramatically over the last several decades, according to statistics kept by the National Climatic Data Center. They could rise between 2.5 and 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century, according to U.S. and United Nations scientific studies.

The Kyoto treaty is supposed to work like a giant stock market, with companies buying and selling pollution credits. There’s money to be made by some companies that cut their emissions deeply, as they could sell pollution credits to others, which then don’t have to clean up. American companies won’t get to play and won’t get to sell tens of millions of dollars’ worth of emissions reductions because the United States hasn’t ratified Kyoto.

“U.S. companies will not be able to participate in this market; that’s a lost opportunity for the U.S.,” Oppenheimer said.

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(c) 2004, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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GRAPHIC (from KRT Graphics, 202-383-6064): 20040930 Russia Kyoto

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