UNITED NATIONS Environmentalists warned on Friday against delaying the fight against global warming just to give the United States more time to come up with a new policy after it spurned the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

"Continuing to await the United States coming forward with new proposals is a losing game," said William Hare, Greenpeace International's climate policy chief. "They don't intend on bringing anything to the table."

"The key message we get is that it's time for the rest of the world to stop listening to the United States," Hare said.

African environment ministers, meanwhile, also scolded Washington for rejecting the Kyoto treaty, saying the move left Africa vulnerable and helpless in the face of global warming.

"Their withdrawal condemns us in the developing world, with the least capacity to adapt, to the dire consequences of climate change," the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment, representing 53 nations, said in a statement.

The criticisms came on the sidelines of a meeting of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, created to follow up on the 1992 Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Environment ministers from some 40 countries were due to meet on Saturday in New York for informal discussions on the way forward in the campaign against global warming.

Environmental groups and various countries have been lining up to slam Washington in the weeks since last month's shock announcement that it was turning its back on the Kyoto accord.

The Bush administration said last month it was dropping out of the Kyoto pact because it would seriously harm the economy and unfairly exempted developing countries.

The pact reached in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 would require industrialized nations to cut their carbon dioxide emissions -- mainly byproducts of manufacturing and automobile use -- an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

The administration said it was launching a comprehensive policy review but gave no deadline for its completion.

The United States is the world's biggest producer of greenhouse gases, responsible for emitting about a quarter of the world's total output.

While some capitals have pronounced the pact dead following Bush's decision, others have vowed to carry on talks in hopes Washington would reverse course and return to the Kyoto process in time for key UN-sponsored talks which resume in Bonn at the end of July.

Although the Kyoto accord was reached in 1997, negotiations are still going on because many of the operational details have not yet been nailed down.

But while the treaty theoretically could come into force even without the United States, it would have little impact if it excluded the source of 25 percent of all emissions.

The environmentalists heaped scorn on an April 1 State Department Memorandum sent to U.S. diplomatic posts stating that maximizing U.S. flexibility on the climate change issue "entails deflecting the focus of public discussions from criticizing the United States because of the concerns about the Kyoto Protocol."

Given the "cavalier attitude" shown by the United States in the memo, "we see no choice for other countries but to just push ahead," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Climate Change Campaign.

(Reuter)