LONDON -- The Canadians and the Australians were just as bad, really, and the Saudi Arabians were outrageous: They want the world to compensate them for every barrel of oil they don't sell if it cuts back on burning fossil fuels to slow global warming. But the Americans were the real reason that the 175-country talks on climate change broke up in chaos at The Hague on Saturday.
"I'm gutted," said Britain's chief negotiator, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, after he stormed out of the conference in fury on Saturday and brought proceedings to an abrupt close. "There's no deal. The talks are finished. We came so close."
But the only reason they came close at all was because Britain, ever the eager go-between, had proposed a deal that would let the United States squirm out of its promise, made when the Convention on Climate Change was first agreed to at Kyoto in 1997, to cut its carbon emissions at least marginally by 2010. "Britain conceded too much to America and it was not acceptable," explained France's chief negotiator, Dominique Voynet, after she and other European Union representatives vetoed the deal and provoked Prescott's dramatic departure.