Thursday’s dramatic policy shift by the White House on climate change, calling on the world’s top economic powers to negotiate long-term goals to reduce greenhouse gases, significantly improves the outlook for future international agreements to address global warming. Improving the outlook even further, China, which is set to surpass the U.S. as the world’s top emitter of greenhouse gases this year, said it is about to release its long-awaited strategic plan on addressing its own emissions problems.
Though the new U.S. initiative may draw criticism from environmentalists who worry that a separate dialogue will undermine broader United Nations negotiations that are just getting under way, the White House argues that the dialogue Mr. Bush envisions will actually strengthen the formal U.N. discussions. It will do so, as our reporters write, by solving the biggest impediments to a deal, namely the lack of participation by emerging giants like China and India, which were exempted from making emissions cuts under the landmark Kyoto accord in 1997.
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