Climate Summit Opens to Calls for Faster U.S. Action

HONOLULU — Leaders of the world's biggest economies opened two days of meetings on global warming here Wednesday amid calls for urgency and more leadership from the United States.

With a small contingent of protesters outside the East-West Center here, and ahead of major student demonstrations planned nationwide on Thursday, a United Nations official implored delegates at the Major Economies Meeting to make substantive decisions on climate change solutions — and do so quickly.

"There is no time left that the world can lose," Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change said Wednesday. "All efforts now have to focus on getting negotiations ... off the ground."

Last month at a UN meeting in Bali, Indonesia, the United States and more than 180 other countries agreed to a framework to develop a new international treaty on global warming by 2009. The treaty will replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

This week's meeting in Honolulu, sponsored by the White House, is supposed to start setting the framework for how the world's 16 biggest economies and the combined European Union will work out their part of the treaty.

The Bush administration also is using the gathering as a stage to try and show the world it is serious about addressing climate change. In Bali, U.S. delegates faced sharp criticism for eschewing international proposals for mandatory greenhouse gas emissions in favor of voluntary standards set on a country-by-country basis.

Administration representatives here are quick to tout the recent passage of an energy bill that includes higher auto fuel efficiency standards and the phase-out of incandescent light bulbs. Such initiatives, they say, are even more effective than ambitious mandatory greenhouse gas emissions caps recently passed by the European Union and endorsed by the United Nations.

"I don't think we need to be ashamed of where we are" compared to other countries, Boyden Gray, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, said during a break in the Honolulu meetings. "We're doing our part."

Outside the conference center, Honolulu resident Melodee Metzger disagreed.

Carrying a sign that read, "Your Delay is Washing Our Future Away," Metzger, 65, said she feared for the future of her children and grandchildren because the U.S. won't support mandatory emissions caps.

"I think the Bush administration shirked its duty to the United States and the rest of the world," she said.

The loudest voices Thursday may not be in Hawaii, however, but on college campuses across the country.

More than 1 million students and 10,000 faculty members on 1,600 campuses are expected to hold demonstrations and "teach-ins" to bring attention to global warming problems. The activities are part of a national movement called Focus the Nation.

In Georgia, more than 70 students from universities throughout the Atlanta region are planning to converge on the Georgia Capitol to lobby legislators to do more to address global warming issues.

"These students feel strongly that they want the 40- and 50-year-olds making decisions down at the Legislature to know that it's their generation that's most impacted by climate change," said organizer Ciannat Howett, who also is director of sustainability initiatives for Emory University.

In Texas, students at Texas A&M University and Rice University are planning meetings with local leaders in College Station and Houston.

In Florida, students at the University of Miami are holding a "Rock n' Renew" concert. Students at the University of Florida will hold debates on alternative energy solutions and demonstrate solar technology and alternative fuel vehicles.

Eban Goodstein, an economics professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. who started the Focus the Nation movement, said the timing of the U.S.-sponsored climate talks here was coincidental — but fitting.

He compared Thursday's planned demonstrations to the civil rights movement, saying grassroots movements like his are necessary to spur the federal and local governments into action.

"Despite the meetings in Hawaii, our political system only really responds to a mobilized and engaged citizenry," Goodstein said on a telephone interview from Orlando, where he'll be attending a University of Central Florida event on Thursday. "If the American people don't rise up and demand change, change won't happen."