Thursday February 14 10:49 PM ET

Japan Not Satisfied with Bush Climate Proposal
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's environment minister said on Friday he wasn't entirely happy about President Bush's plan to combat global warming, adding that Japan would go ahead and ratify the Kyoto treaty rejected by Washington.

Environment Minister Hiroshi Oki's comments came after Bush outlined on Thursday a voluntary plan to slow the growth of global-warming gases in place of mandatory cuts demanded by the widely accepted Kyoto Protocol he rejected last year as harmful to the U.S. economy.

``It's obvious that this plan won't achieve the seven percent reduction target, which the United States had agreed to in Kyoto,'' Oki said.

Under the 1997 Kyoto deal, industrialized nations agreed to cut carbon dioxide emissions by an average 5.2 percent from 1990 levels by 2012. Greenhouse gases, which come mainly from burning fossil fuels, are thought to cause rising global temperatures.

The Kyoto treaty set a target for the United States to reduce emissions by about seven percent below 1990 levels within a decade.

Bush irritated many U.S. allies by rejecting the pact last March saying it would hurt the U.S. economy while other large polluters such as China and India were exempted.

Oki told a news conference that the timing of the announcement, just before Bush's planned arrival in Tokyo on Sunday for a three-day visit, reflected the importance the United States places in ties with Japan.

The plan also showed that the United States was making efforts to tackle global warming, he said.

``But this doesn't mean we are very satisfied with the contents. It's not as if we're extremely happy with it,'' he said.

Bush's plan, most elements of which must be approved by Congress, would set goals for gas reduction tied to U.S. economic growth and give firms incentives to meet them.

Oki reiterated Japan's position that it will ratify the Kyoto treaty even without U.S. participation.

``Japan intends to take all necessary steps to ensure the approval by parliament of the Kyoto Protocol and to enact required legislation during the current parliamentary session,'' he said in a statement released at the news conference.