TIANJIN, China — The United States said on Wednesday that talks in China aimed at laying the foundations for a global climate change treaty had so far failed to make significant progress.

Chief US negotiator Jonathan Pershing said time was fast running out to reach a set of agreements, which would then be submitted for approval at a major United Nations climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, next month.

"There is less agreement than one might have hoped at this stage," Pershing told a small group of reporters nearly halfway through the six days of talks in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin.

"It's going to require a lot of work to get to some significant outcome by the end of this week, which would lead us into a significant outcome in Cancun."

Delegates from more than 170 countries are meeting in Tianjin in an effort to end the gridlock that has plagued UN climate negotiations since the failure by world leaders to achieve a binding agreement in Copenhagen last year.

The eventual goal of the UN process is to secure a post-2012 treaty aimed at limiting global warming and helping countries cope with the potentially devastating environmental impacts of climate change.

This treaty could be clinched at a planned UN summit in South Africa late next year.

Delegates arrived in Tianjin cautioning observers to lower expectations for the week, warning they were looking to find agreements on specific issues as a way of rebuilding trust and momentum going into Cancun.

Rich nations such as the United States have long been at loggerheads with China and other developing countries over actions each side should take to limit the greenhouse gases that scientists blame for global warming.

Pershing warned the UN climate change process could itself be at risk unless the bickering countries started to make progress soon.

"The consequences of not having an agreement coming out of Cancun are things we have to worry about, something to be considered seriously," he said.

"Because the process is going to be very hard-pressed to continue to have these enormous sessions... unless we can use the process to good effect."

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US negotiating stance deemed 'totally unacceptable' by China after American climate envoy accuses delegates of trying to renegotiate Copenhagen accord

The world's two biggest carbon emitters clashed at UN climate talks in China today as the United States' top climate envoy accused his counterparts of trying to renegotiate last year's global climate agreement, and threatened to pursue alternatives to the United Nations negotiation track. China retaliated by calling the US's overall negotiating stance "totally unacceptable."

Jonathan Pershing, the US deputy special envoy for climate change, said the first three days of talks in Tianjin had yielded disappointing results because participants were revisiting old arguments over procedure rather than building on the Copenhagen accord.

"What is frustrating in these negotiations is to see countries not using that as the basis, but relitigating things that we more resolved over the course of the Copenhagen negations," he said.

His comments underline the wide differences between nations despite efforts to try to identify common ground this week so that a partial agreement can be signed at a ministerial level meeting in Cancún later this year.

Given the slow rate of progress, Pershing said there was a concern that no agreement would be possible in Mexico. Echoing comments made this week by EU negotiators, he said it could damage the UN system. "It something to be considered seriously, because the process is going to be very hard-pressed to continue to meet and to continue to have these enormous sessions with a lot of people travelling to them unless we can use the process to good effect," he said. "It may mean that we don't use this process exclusively as the way to move forward."

While there is no suggestion of a full withdrawal from the UN process, the US appears to have hardened its position since Copenhagen amid rising domestic political pressure and the absence of climate legislation.

China has responded in kind. Dropping the diplomatic language that characterised public statements on the first two days, Xie Zhenhua, the head of the host's negotiating team, made little attempt to conceal the target of his frustration.

"A developed country I won't name hasn't done a job for itself. It has not provided financing or technology to other countries, yet it asks them to accept stringent monitoring and voluntary domestic actions," Xie told reporters. "It's totally outrageous. It's quite unacceptable."

There were other signs of rising stress at the halfway point, when the workmanlike calm of the first three days gave way to heated exchanges during a stock-taking session.

When the chairman of the session drew up a to-do list for an agreement at Cancun, the proposal was denounced by China and other developing nations as "premature and imbalanced."

Progress was registered on the issues of forestry, technology transfer and financing for poor nations to cope with climate change, but discussions on the key topic of emission reduction targets were blocked by developing nations.

European officials described the tactics as inexplicable. "We are losing a tremendously important issue," said Jürgen Lefevere, climate strategy adviser to the European commission. "The Cancún target should be to anchor the targets pledged so far, to get them on a paper with a UN heading."

Poorer nations are reluctant to have their pledges mixed with those of richer nations, which have a greater historical responsibility for climate change, particularly given the political uncertainty surrounding the ability of the US to achieve its goals.

Without locking the existing commitments in place, EU officials say it will be difficult to move the discussion forward to the more ambitious goals needed to achieve the Copenhagen target of keeping global warming within 2C by 2050.

The need for greater action was highlighted in a new report published today by WWF, which showed that even if every country lived up to its Copenhagen pledges by 2020, global emissions would be at least 20% higher than the 40 gigatonne budget needed to avoid dangerous climate change.

"It's clear that some countries are facing up to the necessary transformations of their economies but other countries have failed to endorse this new trend speedily and are risking the safety and prosperity of all," said Gordon Shepherd, leader of WWF's global climate initiative. (By Jonathan Watts)

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Climate change skeptics have been used as “a weapon” by countries opposing a binding treaty on emission reductions to stifle climate negotiations, officials say.

Those opposing climate change also often emerged with knotty terms such as “a politically binding statement” or “a legally binding agreement” to confuse talks.

“They use skeptics and unhelpful terms to confuse negotiations. It then impacts the talks,” The President’s special envoy for climate change, Rachmat Witoelar told reporters Thursday.

Rachmat declined to name the countries, saying the number of climate skeptics increased after e-mail messages written by experts questioning predictions by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were leaked before last year’s Copenhagen talks.

Former environment minister Rachmat accused the countries taking sides with the email skeptics were those selfishly looking out for their own interests.

“They use it because they don’t want to provide financial aid to developing nations to deal with climate change,” he said.

“For Indonesia, the IPCC reports are authentic scientific proof of climate change,” he said.

The negotiations on climate talks aimed to seal a global deal with binding emissions reduction targets in an effort to stabilize the amount of greenhouse gas being released into the atmosphere and slow the impacts of climate change.

But negotiations have stalled since nations met in Bali in 2007.

The Bali climate conference required the world to agree to a protocol determining emissions reduction targets by 2009 in Copenhagen to pave way for countries to ratify it before its implementation in 2013.

The new treaty was expected to replace the Kyoto Protocol that would end term in 2012. The protocol binds only developed nations to 5 percent emissions cuts.

Negotiators from 190 countries have so far met three times this year in Bonn, Germany to restart talks after the failure of Copenhagen. Negotiators will meet from Oct. 2 to 6 in China as the last preparatory meeting ahead of December’s meeting in Mexico.

Rachmat presaged the conference in Cancun, Mecixo, would not produce a legally binding treaty on emissions cuts.

“But, the Mexico meeting could build pillars of agreements on fast tracking money, adaptation, technology transfers and REDD issues,” he said.

REDD stands for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, which was expected to be alternative way to cut emissions since the clearing of forests is blamed for the release of about 20 percent of global emissions.

Meteorological expert from the Bandung Technology of Institute (ITB) Armi Susandi said climate change negotiations had been hijacked by politics.

“The climate change skeptics are only buying time,” Armi told The Jakarta Post.

According to Armi, IPCC reports on the global warming and impacts of climate change were nothing new to scientists around the world.

“If we look at it in the context of countries, the impacts of global warming will be far more dangerous than outlined in the IPCC report, since the earth will respond very quickly to each degree increase,” he said.

He called on negotiators to understand the science behind global warming to speed up negotiations to save the planet. (By Adianto P. Simamora)

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WASHINGTON — Major economies looked Monday at how to cooperate in shifting to cleaner sources of energy, with a top policy board warning the world's current path was unsustainable.

Senior officials from economies making up 80 percent of global Gross Domestic Product opened two days of talks in Washington in a US initiative to find common ground amid torturous negotiations on a new climate change treaty.

The meeting comes as the United States tries to end the worst oil disaster in its history, a three-month-long spill from a BP well in the Gulf of Mexico.

"Without major changes to the way we produce and in energy use, we will confront untenable risks to our collective energy security and to the environment in the future," Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), told the delegates.

"Indeed, the Deepwater Horizon accident in the Gulf of Mexico is a tragic reminder of this," he said.

The IEA, which advises advanced economies, said in a recent study that without a shift from fossil fuels, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions -- which are blamed for global warming -- would nearly double by 2050.

The IEA said that, even leaving aside environmental benefits, a decision to make more than half of light vehicles eco-friendly by 2050 would save global consumers 112 trillion dollars -- although the costs of adjustment would be 46 trillion dollars.

"We still have formidable challenges before us, but each day we wait, the challenge becomes harder. Every year of delay adds 500 billion US dollars to the cost of action," Tanaka said.

US Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the host of the meeting, later announced one initiative -- lighter-colored paint on the roof of the Energy Department headquarters along with other agency buildings outside of Washington.

He said the project, to begin this summer, would better cool buildings and reflect more of the sun's heat, leading to thousands of dollars in annual savings on air-conditioning.

"Cool roofs are one of the quickest and lowest cost ways we can reduce our global carbon emissions and begin the hard work of slowing climate change," Chu said, adding that he would recommend that other US departments follow suit.

Delegates said the two-day meeting was likely to announce joint initiatives, although it was unclear how specific they would be.

One area of discussions will be on how to develop a cleaner form of coal, which makes up more than a quarter of the global energy supply and is politically sensitive in the United States and China, the top two polluters.

The clean energy meeting, which Chu expected to be the first of several, is an offshoot of the US-led Major Economies Forum, which brings key nations together to seek progress on fighting climate change.

Negotiations on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, whose requirements for nations to cut emissions run out at the end of 2012, have been hamstrung by disputes over how much to demand of both developed and emerging economies.

The countries taking part in the clean energy talks are Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Russia, South Korea, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates and the United States.

The European Union is also participating, along with a number of international organizations. (By Shaun Tandon)

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