After a weekend-long meeting in Trieste, Italy, environmental ministers from Russia and the world’s top seven industrialized countries pledged yesterday that they would continue to work together to fight global warming. In a formal declaration, the ministers wrote, “We commit ourselves … to strive to reach agreement on outstanding political issues and to ensure in a cost-effective manner the environmental integrity of the Kyoto Protocol.” The statement also said that the countries should achieve the bulk of their reductions in greenhouse gas emissions at home, rather than buying the right to pollute from other countries. The real shocker? — that U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman, the Bush administration representative at the Group of Eight meeting, signed the declaration at all. It was less shocking, perhaps, that Italian riot police blocked peaceful protesters from reaching the site of the ministers’ meeting on Saturday.
