February 04, 2007	Sunday	Muharram 15, 1428

WASHINGTON, Feb 3: The Bush administration played down the US contribution to world climate change on Friday and called for a “global discussion” after a UN report blamed humans for much of the warming over the past 50 years.

“We are a small contributor when you look at the rest of the world,” US Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said of greenhouse gas emissions. “It’s really got to be a global discussion.”

The United States is responsible for one-quarter of the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide and uses one-quarter of the world's crude oil.

A unilateral US programme to cut emissions might hurt the economy and send business overseas, Bodman said.

But Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who chairs the US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said:

“This report must serve as a wake-up call to those policymakers who have ignored this issue. We must take action now.”

Speaking later to reporters at the United Nations, Boxer called on President George W. Bush to convene a summit of 12 nations most responsible for polluting the atmosphere and said she was also inviting to Washington soon some of the world’s top scientists who contributed to the UN report.

“And so this really puts to rest, I think, the debate over the science,” she said of the report.

Bodman, speaking in measured tones that accepted the reality of global climate change, but stopped short of urging specific limits on the emission of greenhouse gases that contribute to it, hailed the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released in Paris.

“We’re very pleased with it. We’re embracing it. We agree with it,” Bodman told a news conference. “Human activity is contributing to changes in our Earth’s climate and that issue is no longer up for debate.”

—Reuters