EC environment chief to give Earth Summit a miss
BRUSSELS — The European Community’s top environment official has announced that he would not attend next month’s Earth Summit in a gesture which reflects growing pessimism in Brussels about prospects for the huge conference.
Environment Commissioner Carlo Ripa di Meana announced on Wednesday that he would not take part in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development starting In Rio de Janeiro next week because most of its results had been agreed.
The Italian commissioner took his decision a day after EC environment ministers failed to agree on key elements of the platform he had wanted the commission to take to the summit.
In a thinly-veiled condemnation both of US tactics in watering down a treaty on global warming due to be signed in Rio and of the EC’s readiness to accept it, Mr Ripa said he believed in an environment ‘policy "based on binding obligations and precise undertakings, not on words".
In Washington, the head of the US Senate delegation to the summit, Senator Al Gore, on Wednesday also accused President George Bush’s administration of watering down the proposed treaty on global warming and of poisoning the atmosphere of negotiations to protect biodiversity.
The US is the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide, the most important of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.
European and other governments wanted a treaty to cap the emission of such gases. Mr. Bush held out for a treaty that set no specific limitations.
Meanwhile, in Beijing, officials said China would, at the Rio summit, express the view that the developed world should foot the bill for ecological protection.
"The developed countries have contributed much more to the degradation of the environment, they should take greater responsibilities," said Mr Xia Kunbao, who heads the national Agency for the Protection of the Environment.
World leaders or their ministers are also due to sign a convention on protecting the planet’s wealth of animals and plants. — Reuter, AP, AFP.
Source : The Straits Times, May 29 1992
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