Obama lands, climate talks in serious disarray

Copenhagen: US President Barack Obama joined world leaders Friday in a final push for a climate pact but poor nations feared the agreement would fail to stave off the worst ravages of global warming.

Obama flew in to a snowy Copenhagen to join about 120 heads of state and government at the climax of 12-day talks which have been marked by inter-continental wrangling and large-scale protests.

The UN climate talks were in serious disarray Friday, with delegates blaming both the US and China for the lack of a political agreement that President Barack Obama, China's premier and more than 110 other world leaders are supposed to sign within hours.

Broad disputes continued behind closed doors between wealthy nations and developing ones, delegates said - the divide that from the start has dogged the two-week UN climate conference, which aimed to reach agreements on deeper reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming.

Both Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao were in the Danish capital, but no agreed text had emerged just an hour before the presidents and premiers were to gather at a Copenhagen convention hall, said Swedish Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren.

"It is now up to world leaders to decide," he said, suggesting they would be pressed to make last-minute decisions on the thrust of the climate declaration.

Carlgren, negotiating on behalf of the 27-nation European Union, blamed the morning's impasse on the Chinese for "blocking again and again," and on the US for coming too late with an improved offer, a long-range climate aid program announced Thursday by US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

A leading African delegate, meanwhile, complained bitterly about the proposed declaration. "It's weak. There's nothing ambitious in this text," Lumumba Di-Aping of Sudan, a leader of the developing nations bloc, said Friday.

Any agreement was expected, at best, to envision emissions-cutting targets for rich nations and billions for poor countries, but fall well short of the goal of a legally binding pact.

If the political deal is done, it would still be seen by many as a setback, following two years of intense negotiations to agree on new emissions reductions and financial support for poorer nations.

China and the US, the world's largest carbon polluters, had sought to give the negotiations a boost on Thursday with an announcement and a concession.

Clinton said Washington would press the world to come up with a climate aid fund amounting to $100 billion a year by 2020, a move that was quickly followed by an offer from China to open its reporting on actions to reduce carbon emissions to international review.

That issue - money to help poor nations cope with climate change and shift to clean energy - seemed to be where negotiators at the 193-nation conference could claim most success. That text under discussion early Friday.

Pollution cuts and the best way to monitor those actions remained unresolved. And negotiators also didn't come to an agreement on an important procedural issue - just what legal form a future deal would take.

Yvo de Boer, the UN's top climate official, tried to be positive, saying a political deal could be the key to later unlocking the negotiating stalemate on a range of issues.

"Leaders came here to lead, and that's what they're doing. They're trying to reach an understanding on the key political components - and that's good," de Boer told The Associated Press well after midnight.

But he cautioned that a political declaration needed to include a deadline for agreeing on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, whose modest emission cuts for 37 industrialized nations expire in 2012. The US rejects Kyoto and would be covered by a separate eventual agreement.

"You can reach an agreement here that sets out major political contours, a long-term goal, targets for industrialized countries, engagement by major developing countries, financing," he said. "But people will want to see a clear deadline that turns that into a legally binding instrument."

Delegates filtering out of the predawn discussions Friday sounded disappointed.

"It's a political statement, but it isn't a lot," said Chinese delegate Li Junhua.
"It would be a major disappointment. A political declaration would not guarantee our survival," said Selwin Hart, a delegate from Barbados speaking for the Alliance of Small Island States, many of which are threatened by seas rising form global warming.

The conference has been plagued by growing distrust between rich and poor nations. Both sides blamed the other for failing to take ambitions actions to tackle climate change and bickered over a post-Kyoto legal framework. At one point, African delegates staged a partial boycott of the talks.

World leaders handed off the draft text of about three pages at about 3 a.m. local time to their ministers and they continued to work on it through the night. But by 5 am, negotiators from Mexico and the G-77 plus China said they were nowhere near agreement on the final document.

Clinton's announcement on funding was widely praised. Yoshiko Kijima, a senior Japanese negotiator, said it sent a strong signal by Obama "that he will persuade his own people that we need to show something to developing countries. I really respect that."

Carlgren, speaking for the EU, said Clinton added "political momentum" to the talks and India's Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh called it "a good step forward."

But none of the leaders at the summit offered to increase their emissions targets, which the United Nations has concluded would fall far short of what is needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.