July 4 (UPI) - -  Although President George Bush seems to be getting all the heat global warming has to offer, the U.S. is not alone in refusing to make specific international commitments to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Some of the countries the U.S. administration publically nags the most don’t want to make any commitment whatever.

The U.S. administration says that if it ratified a Kyoto Protocol agreement with no international CO2 emissions trading allowed, that it fears a 1 to 2 percent slowdown in the U.S. economy. The main U.S. focus of criticism, the Chinese, say that committing to Kyoto targets now would hamper development, condemning their people to a low standard of living.

Earlier this month, Bush said, "The world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases is China. Yet, China was entirely exempted from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. India and Germany are among the top emitters. Yet, India was also exempt from Kyoto."

Critics of the administration’s position often point to the undisputed fact that more than 80 percent of greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere are from the developed countries. Additionally, energy use and income disparities between developed countries and developing countries are often cited.

On average, a person in the United States uses 14 times as much energy as a person in China, with 7 times the CO2 emissions per capita. Per person use in the U.S. is 30 times as great as in India, with 18 times the emission per person each year, based on data from the U.S. Department of Energy. On average, purchasing power per person in the United States in 1995 was nine times as great as in China and 18 times that in India.

Yet a per capita approach in an attempt reach fairness will doom the entire process, according to Frank E. Loy, the head of the U.S. delegation to international climate meetings during the Clinton administration and former U.S. Under Secretary of State for Global affairs. "If we’re going to start talking about per capita emissions and trying to equalize those, we will never, never, never, never have an international agreement and therefore I think that is a dead-end," Loy told United Press International, speaking from Rome in a telephone interview.

Loy explained the initial attempts to divide up the planet in a fair way into developed and developing countries. "It wasn’t sort of a smooth spectrum of countries. Either you were in one camp or the other. . . . And we were quite prepared to go first and we were quite prepared for them to have quite different obligations than ours, but we thought they ought to have obligations. And we were working in that direction. Now, we didn’t get there. But that was our answer to the question as to how to make it fair."

One main fairness issue centers around the idea that those countries who put most of the CO2 into the atmosphere should move first. This would be the richer, more technologically and industrially developed nations. Calculations made by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, based on U.S. Department of Energy statistics for emissions, show that from 1950 through 1995 the United States emitted about180 billion tons of CO2, more than three times China's 54 billion tons, for example. It is the cumulative total that determines how much heat is trapped by the CO2 in the atmosphere.

The White House cabinet-level task force on climate change claims that "current data indicate that developing countries net emissions (including emissions and uptake from land use activities) have already exceeded those of the developed world."Land use can include burning trees and the removal of CO2 from the air by all forms of vegetation.

Boni Biagini, a senior scientist at World Resources Institute (WRI) who specializes in climate studies, related the cumulative emissions issue to fairness. "When you say that the Kyoto Protocol is unfair, it’s playing with the people not understanding the dumping of garbage today and the dumping of decades of garbage. The industrialized countries, and not only the United States, but the Europeans, the Japanese, the Australians, the so-called OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, the industrial countries, have piled up, in the atmosphere, their greenhouse gas emissions over decades. So the buildup of the concentrations is what has already created global change now," Biagini told UPI.

Total annual industrial emissions from developing countries and from developed countries will be about equal by the year 2015. The total concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will be equal from these two groups of countries by about 2057, according to calculations by Duncan Austin, José Goldemberg, and Gwen Parker, in their paper "Contributions to climate change: Are conventional metrics misleading the debate?," available at the WRI website.

By 2100, countries now labeled as developing will account for about 60 percent of what is in the atmosphere, according to Austin, Goldemberg and Parker, and their annual emissions will be about twice what the now-labeled as developed world is producing. By 2100, the per capita CO2 emissions in the currently developed world will be four times as great as the developing world.

The argument for developed countries taking CO2 emissions control steps now was explained by Eileen Claussen, President of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. " I think the most important thing you should look at when you think about fairness is responsibility. And for responsibility you have to look at the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and who put them there," Claussen told UPI. The Pew Center has studied the fairness, or equity, issue extensively and held a major conference on the subject this spring.

Opponents of Kyoto acknowledge the role of industrialized nations but are concerned about future emissions. Glenn Kelly, executive director of Global Climate Coalition, a U.S. organization that describes itself as "the largest and longest serving voice for business in the climate debate." told UPI, "It's clear that the developed nations bear the responsibility for the situation as it exists now due to human factors. . . . If, however, the goal is to either limit the growth of greenhouse gas concentrations or if it's to stabilize it or even reduce it, as has been proposed in the Kyoto protocol, then it is clear neither of those goals can be reached without commitments of developing nations because that’s exactly where the greenhouse gas growth is going to come in the next 10 to 15 years and well beyond."

China, the main target of U.S. criticism, has consistently supported the Kyoto protocol and has also consistently refused to give any international commitment to reduce CO2 emissions by a specific amount or by a specific date, even while taking dramatic steps domestically to reduce emissions by limiting coal consumption and ending coal subsidies.

Zhang Xiaoan, an economist with the Chinese Mission to the United Nations, explained the Chinese position to UPI, "We are not ready to commit to anything, even while we are doing it at home. . . . It's not fair to commit internationally when the U.S. just refuses everything. . . . When you see the consumption pattern in the United States and when you see the consumption pattern in China then you can understand why we cannot accept that. People are still suffering from poverty. How can we reduce our consumption of energy in this low level of development? It's impossible," she said.

Fairness for many of the countries not currently required to sign-on under the Kyoto Protocol involves technology transfer from the developed world as well as facilitating capital flows. Most of these countries are members of the 133-nation G-77 group.

Ambassador Bagher Asadi of Iran, who is the Chairman of the Group of 77, said last week, "The most important, and in fact, the most pressing issue before us all, the entire international community, is to undertake with resolve and good faith to strengthen the implementation of the provisions of the Climate Change Convention. . . . From our pont of view, and it comes as no surprise, adaptation, technology transfer and provision of financial resources are Convention issues whose implementation should command priority."

Copyright 2001 by United Press International.