EU environment ministers, angered at the abrupt US pull-out from the Kyoto protocol on global warming, are meeting today and tomorrow in Sweden.
Dutch Environment Minister Mr Jan Pronk was cautiously optimistic on his arrival, saying, "The last word has not yet been spoken."
Mr Pronk said he hoped for a concerted "political pressure" on the US to rethink its decision.
"We need [the US] in the Kyoto protocol," he told reporters. "We are doing our very best. I went [to Washington] the last couple of days in order to try to convince the administration.
"We have to ... work together with all the umbrella countries, including the United States," he said in a reference to the Kyoto signatories.
His Swedish counterpart, Mr Kjell Larsson, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, said the EU was "continuing to lead and act against global warming."
Mr Larsson was speaking to a handful of demonstrators from the Swedish ecology group Faltbiologerna in front of the Kiruna City Hall, where the ministerial meeting was taking place.
President George W. Bush irritated many countries this week when he abruptly announced that his country would not ratify the 1997 Kyoto treaty, calling it "deeply flawed" and contrary to US economic interests.
The EU reacted with alarm saying it would send a delegation to Washington next week for urgent talks with the US administration.
"This is extremely worrying," EU Environment Commissioner Ms Margot Wallstrom said. "We don't like what we are hearing" from Washington.
The EU Commission president, Mr Romano Prodi, was particularly harsh in his criticism, telling an Italian newspaper: "if one wants to be a world leader, one must know how to look after the entire earth and not only American industry."
"There are certain things one cannot go back on," he told the La Repubblicanewspaper.
European Parliament President Ms Nicole Fontaine said yesterday: "To claim that the cost of this fight (against greenhouse gases) would be too high is an argument that dismays me because I cannot conceive that the number-one economic power of the planet ... would put the world's ecosystem in grave danger."
She said she hoped the informal ministerial meeting in this town in Sweden's far north would make clear "the EU's willingness to continue on the Kyoto Protocol path and build dialogue with other industrialized countries and developing countries so that those with a sense of responsibility will continue to move forward."
French President Jacques Chirac called the US turnabout "a worrying and unacceptable challenge to the Kyoto Protocol" and "solemnly" called on industrialized nations to implement the treaty "in its entirety."
AFP