"It's going to be very difficult for the United States to get back to a Kyoto-type (agreement) because it has a rigid target and timetable agreement" for emissions cuts, Harlan Watson, senior climate negotiator at the State Department, told journalists here.

"(...) For the foreseeable future, anyway, the United States would not be particularly pleased with the Kyoto framework. We think that there are basic difficulties, there are also some operational difficulties."

Bush delivered the UN's draft anti-global warming treaty a crippling blow in March 2001 when he announced that the United States -- the biggest single culprit for the pollution -- would not ratify the deal.

He said it was too costly for the US economy, which is overwhelmingly dependent on carbon-rich fossil fuels, and unfair because it did not tie India and China and other fast-growing populous countries to specific emissions cuts.

Kyoto has been completed but needs ratification by Russia to take effect on its complex ratification procedure. Despite this, moves are already underway for shaping the next round in the Kyoto process, with talks due to start in

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been dragging his feet about whether he will put the draft agreement to parliament.

Watson said he expected Putin to announce his decision "later next year, at the earliest, giving the upcoming Duma elections in December and the presidential election in March."

Kyoto's framework was signed in 1997, but it took nearly five years to agree its complex rulebook.

It requires 39 industrialised countries to cut carbon dioxide and five other gases by a broad timetable 2008-2012 compared with their 1990 levels. In the case of the United States, that would have entailed a reduction of seven percent.

However, years of strong growth in the United States and negligible efforts to control American emissions mean that the United States is set to be 30 percent above its 1990 level by 2012.

Bush has announced a series of unilateral and voluntary cuts that, according to Watson, would reduce this from 30 to just over 25 percent.

The six substances named in the Kyoto Protocol are "greenhouse gases" -- they trap the Sun's heat in the atmosphere instead of letting it radiate safely out into space. This causes the temperature of the air, sea and land to rise, stoking the risk of irreversible climate change.

SPACE.WIRE