UN climate summit puts China, India in spotlight

By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer

UNITED NATIONS – The highest-level conference yet on climate change opened Tuesday with 100 world leaders gathering at the United Nations to try to jump-start stalled negotiations toward a global climate pact.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on presidents, prime ministers and other leaders "to accelerate the pace of negotiations and to strengthen the ambition of what is on offer" for a deal at Copenhagen, Denmark in December.

"Failure to reach broad agreement in Copenhagen would be morally inexcusable, economically shortsighted and politically unwise," he warned. "The science demands it. The world economy needs it."

Much attention was fixed on U.S. President Barack Obama's first U.N. speech, where he said the United States is "determined to act."

"The threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing," Obama said, after receiving loud applause. "And the time we have to reverse this tide is running out."

But the presidents of China, India and other major economies were spelling out plans for billions of people and their households, businesses and farms in the decades ahead.

Chinese President Hu Jintao said his nation will continue to take "determined" action. He laid out new plans for extending China's energy-saving programs and targets for reducing "by a notable margin" the "intensity" of its carbon pollution — carbon dioxide emission increases as related to economic growth.

He said China would greatly boost its forest cover, "climate-friendly technologies" and use 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

China and the U.S. each account for about 20 percent of all the world's greenhouse gas pollution created when coal, natural gas or oil are burned. The European Union is next, generating 14 percent, followed by Russia and India, which each account for 5 percent.

But the Paris-based International Energy Agency expects global carbon emissions will drop by 2.6 percent this year, the biggest such decrease in more than 40 years, because of the world's recession that is slowing industrial activity, according to projections first reported Monday by The Financial Times.

Obama said the U.S. is doubling the generating capacity from wind and other renewable resources in three years, launching offshore wind energy projects and spending billions to capture carbon pollution from coal plants.

Obama has announced a target of returning to 1990 levels of greenhouse emissions by 2020. But with the U.S. lagging on climate legislation, more specific and ambitious plans are expected from China, India and other major economies.

Tuesday's U.N. summit and the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh later this week seek to add pressure on rich nations to commit to greenhouse gas cuts and to pay for poorer nations to burn less coal and preserve their forests.

Heat waves, droughts, melting glaciers, loss of the Greenland ice sheet and other dangers are fast approaching, said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former vice president Al Gore in 2007.

"The science leaves us with no room for inaction now," he said.

India, too, was expected to lay out plans for the fifth-biggest contributor of global warming gases to bump up fuel efficiency, burn coal more cleanly, preserve forests and grow more organic crops.

The United States, under former President George W. Bush's administration, long cited inaction by China and India as the reason for rejecting mandatory cuts in greenhouse gases.

But neither China nor India say they will agree to binding greenhouse-gas cuts like those envisioned in a new climate pact to start in 2013. They question why they should, when not even the U.S. will agree to join rich nations in scaling back their pollution.

"The crisis today on climate change is the inability of the United States to put on the table credible emissions reduction targets for 2020," said Jairam Ramesh, India's environment minister.

The EU is urging other rich countries to match its pledge to cut emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, and has said it would cut up to 30 percent if other rich countries follow suit.

Japanese's prime minister, whose nation generates more than 4 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, said his nation will seek a 25 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2020.

"I will now seek to unite our efforts to address current and future climate change with due consideration of the role of science," said Yukio Hatoyama, six days after taking office. "I am resolved to exercise the political will require to deliver on this promise."

China's ambition to grow quickly but cleanly soon may vault it to "front-runner" status — far ahead of the United States — in taking on global warming, the U.N. climate chief said Monday.

"China and India have announced very ambitious national climate change plans. In the case of China, so ambitious that it could well become the front-runner in the fight to address climate change," U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer told The Associated Press. "The big question mark is the U.S."