An anti-globalization demonstrator fires a flare over the heads of police near the site of the meeting
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An anti-globalization demonstrator fires a flare over the heads of police near the site of the meeting |
Saturday, March 03, 2001
By Philip Pullella
TRIESTE (Reuters) - Italian riot police on Saturday blocked thousands of anti-globalization demonstrators from reaching the site of a meeting of environment ministers from the G8 industrialized nations.
The protesters staged a loud but mostly peaceful protest in Trieste, throwing colored smoke bombs and sending flares into the sky over the heads of security forces.
But police, who were decked out in riot gear and brandishing tear gas guns, stayed calm as the demonstrators passed within a few hundred meters (yards) of the venue and then moved on to hold a rally near the train station.
More than 3,000 police and special bomb and marine units had moved into the area over the past two days to prepare for possible clashes.
The talks have been marked by concerns that uncertainty over the U.S. position on an international agreement to fight climate change may weaken a final consensus when the meeting ends on Sunday.
The new administration of President George W. Bush — represented in Trieste by environment policy head Christine Todd Whitman — has said it wants to move ahead in tackling global warming and will attend key talks in Bonn in July.
Whitman said Washington was not backtracking from an international commitment it made in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan to cut the pollution blamed for global warming.
"Let me just start with the clear and unequivocal statement that the global climate review that's being undertaken by this administration does not represent a backing away from Kyoto," she told reporters.
But she heavily qualified the Bush administration's acceptance of the U.N. pact under which industrialized nations agreed to trim their "greenhouse gas" emissions by 2010.
Crucially, she refused to confirm whether Bush would be bound by the target of reducing greenhouse gases by seven percent of 1990 levels by 2010 that the United States agreed to in Kyoto.
"We are not committing to any number," she said. "We are committing to the overall goal of achieving progress."
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The Trieste meeting is the first time ministers have met since talks in The Hague last November, which tried to move the world forward on implementing Kyoto.
Italian Environment Minister Willer Bordon, speaking during a break in the closed-door meeting, said there would not be a negative message from Trieste.
"There will be no backtracking. That doesn't mean that everything that happened at The Hague (before talks were suspended) will be accepted en masse," he said.
"This means that there will be no rethinking of the principal objective — the reduction of greenhouse gases. This is the fundamental point and today everyone confirmed their maximum commitment and Whitman made a very positive contribution," Bordon said.
A U.N. scientific panel has said the average global temperature is likely to rise by between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius (2.5-10.4 Fahrenheit) over the next 100 years. Sea levels could rise by as much as 88 cm (35 inches).
Such a change in temperature — which many scientists believe is being caused by pollution trapping heat in the atmosphere — would mean widespread droughts and floods and massive economic and natural damage, experts say.
Copyright © 2001 Reuters Limited.