MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia, under pressure at the U.N. Earth Summit to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, would be better off sinking the pact altogether, leading Russian scientists said Thursday.
Russia, one of the world's worst polluters, has committed itself to ratifying the accord on reducing carbon dioxide emissions. At the Sustainable Development summit in Johannesburg this week it heard calls to speed up the process.
India, host to an October U.N. Climate Summit, said it had received "positive indications," but Russian ecologists saw little sign Moscow intended to ratify the treaty any time soon.
Due to a complex weighting system, Russia's ratification is essential to bringing the agreement into force after the United States, the world's top air polluter, pulled out of the pact.
"As a scientist, I understand Kyoto will not change the climate problem," Igor Nazorov of Russia's climate monitoring agency said. "The United States was not stupid. It worked out a list of reasons why it should not sign the protocol. There are better ways than Kyoto."
Vitaly Morozov, a scientist and adviser on the Kyoto Protocol at the Ministry of Natural Resources, said the pact was not in Russia's interests, despite a clause that would allow Moscow to sell the slice of its pollution quota that it does not use, bringing in some $30 billion by 2012.
Russia will not be able to use its quota fully in the medium term, mainly because of the collapse of the country's industrial sector since 1990, the reference date for the Kyoto pact.
"Russia fully compensates for its waste emissions with its ecosystem, even if you discount the vast areas of forest," Morozov said. "Is this treaty fair to us? I am not sure. I understand a consensus has to be reached, but each country has economic and political interests."
"After the 1990s, our economic collapse lowered (carbon) emissions, but because of that do we have to stay in poverty? If we are to live better, we must develop, and to develop we need energy," he said. "We need $150 billion to overhaul our energy sector. But no one will help us with the cash."
RUSSIA'S PRECIOUS 17 PERCENT
To come into force, the treaty's backers must include enough industrialized nations to account for 50 percent of what carbon emissions were in 1990.
The U.S. withdrawal put its mammoth 36 percent share off limits and made Russia's 17 percent slice critical for the 1997 treaty's survival.
European Union countries and Japan have already ratified the accord, which Washington rejected on the grounds that fixed emission reduction targets would hurt the economy.
But Natalya Oleferenko, head of the Greenpeace climate program in Moscow, said Russia was unlikely to sign the deal by the September deadline announced earlier in the year.
"The reason we have not yet signed this document is difficult to explain to a Westerner. Russia can never decide whether something is profitable or not," Oleferenko said. "We signed the Stockholm Convention (on organic pollutants) a day before the deadline ran out. That says it all."
There were hopes that at the Earth Summit, a follow-up to the meeting in Rio de Janeiro 10 years ago that began U.N. efforts to tackle global warming, could see the final implementation of the Kyoto accord.
But Russian ratification, scientific concerns apart, appears stalled by the Moscow's Byzantine bureaucracy, where four ministries and a government commission are responsible for the protocol, in the absence of a ministry dealing specifically with the environment.
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