The head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, Christie Whitman, was quoted as saying the US had "no interest in implementing that treaty" because Congress was unlikely to ratify it. She said the Administration would remain engaged in international negotiations on ways to address climate change.
Mr Bush referred in his letter to a "sense of the Senate" vote in which senators voted 95-0 against the US taking any action on climate change unless developing countries also took measures to reduce their emissions.
Such comments have prompted the Europeans to reaffirm their commitment to the Kyoto Protocol and call for an urgent transatlantic dialogue. The Japanese are also understood to be unimpressed.
So is New Zealand.
Energy Minister Pete Hodgson said in Parliament yesterday that New Zealand shared the grave concern and disappointment of many other nations at recent statements that might indicate the US would abandon the Kyoto Protocol.
In the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 34 developed countries agreed to quantified targets for reducing emissions of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming in the "first commitment period," 2008 to 2012.
In New Zealand's case, the target is to get its emission back to 1990 levels. The US target under Kyoto is to cut its emissions to 7 per cent below 1990 levels. Its emissions were already 10 per cent above that level in 1997 and have been rising 1.2 per cent a year.
The Kyoto Protocol has some serious advantages from a New Zealand point of view.
Crucially, it envisages the use a market mechanism, international trading in a sort of quota representing the right to emit a given quantity of greenhouse gas.
Trading allows the most cost-effective measures to reduce emissions, and thereby free carbon quota, to be taken regardless of which country that might be in.
New Zealand starts from a relatively clean position, with few smokestack industries and electricity generation still two-thirds from hydro sources.
That means that it starts from further up the cost curve in terms of the marginal cost of reducing emissions. It has more to gain from the intrinsic efficiency of a quota trading regime.
The Kyoto Protocol takes 1990 as its base year - emissions targets for each are expressed as some fraction of their 1990 levels.
Since 1990 New Zealand has lost millions of methane-belching sheep, but gained millions of pine trees which lock up COinf2 (at least as long as they are growing).
Both of those trends make it easier to meet its target. Mr Hodgson said yesterday that the protocol's clause 3.3 (which acknowledges the role of forests as carbon sinks) meant that New Zealand would be a net beneficiary.
The Bush Administration's backing away from Kyoto comes hard on the heels of updated work by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an attempt to distil a consensus among the world's climate scientists. It revised upward its estimated range of how much the average global surface temperature might rise over the course of this century. The high end of the range, 5 degrees C, is as much warming as has occurred since the last ice age.
President Bush's letter to the senators said that his Administration took global warming seriously. But it also refers to "incomplete state of the scientific knowledge of the causes of and solutions to global climate change."
Talks on what the Kyoto Protocol's broad-brush provisions would mean in legally binding practice broke down in The Hague last November. They are due to resume in Bonn in July, two months later than intended to give the US time to complete a cabinet-level review of its climate change policy.
In recent weeks, the official line in Wellington has been that we should wait and see what the review came up with, and how it was received by the rest of the developed world in Bonn, before pronouncing the last rites over Kyoto.
The Government has said it wants to ratify the Kyoto Protocol by the middle of next year, 10 years after the Rio de Janeiro earth summit. Most European governments have indicated they will.
Employers and Manufacturers Association chief executive Alasdair Thompson said yesterday: "We urge the Government to reassess New Zealand's position on this, because realistically if the US is not involved, the protocol won't work."
For the protocol to come into effect and be legally binding, it has to be ratified by countries representing at least 55 per cent of 1990 COinf2 emissions. If the US, which accounted for 36 per cent of 1990 emissions, does not ratify, Canada (3.3 per cent) says it will not.
In any case, the Kyoto Protocol as it stands is not in a fit state for anyone to ratify. In practice, without US participation that will not change.
But the international negotiating process which gave rise to that particular text flows from the original UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which the US has ratified, and that would continue.
With the prospect that developing country emissions will equal or surpass developed-country emissions in the coming decade, US concerns about free-riding are understandable.
But so is the attitude among developing countries that the rich nations, rich because of their past emissions, cannot now kick away the ladder they have climbed.
The view that developed countries must start to get their own house in order, before demanding buy-in from developing countries, is not going to go away, however much the US might dislike it.
The challenge it now faces is: If not Kyoto, then what? If not now, when?
Herald Online feature: Climate change
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
*
Summary: Climate Change 2001
United Nations Environment Program
World Meteorological Organisation
Framework Convention on Climate Change
