Fresh from a White House meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who also made a heart-felt plea for a climate protocol in a speech to US lawmakers, Obama held talks with European Union leaders to assure them his administration supported a new treaty at next month's summit in Copenhagen.

At a EU-US summit here, which continues Wednesday with talks with US Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the Europeans pressed Washington to take action on climate change ahead of December's climate summit, warning that not enough had been done.

"All of us agreed that it is imperative for us to redouble our efforts in the weeks between now and the Copenhagen meeting to assure that we create a framework for progress in dealing with (a) potential ecological disaster," Obama said after talks with European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso, Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt of Sweden, who holds the EU presidency, and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

Merkel, in a rare speech to a joint session of Congress, compared the battle over climate change to the struggle to bring down the Berlin Wall two decades ago this week.

She also backed Western calls for emerging nations to do more. "I'm convinced that once we in Europe and America show ourselves ready to adopt binding agreements, we will also be able to persuade China and India to join in," she said.

But even as she and Obama stressed the need to solidify a framework agreement at Copenhagen, US Republican lawmakers boycotted a committee meeting on an Obama-backed bill to set the first US requirements on curbing carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

Asked what impact Merkel's speech might have on the US debate, Senator James Inhofe, the top Republican on the committee looking at the climate legislation, said: "None whatsoever."

Earlier Tuesday Barroso, who praised Obama for having "changed the climate on climate negotiations," said he was "worried by the lack of progress in negotiations" ahead of the December 7-18 climate meeting

The summit in the Danish capital has been convened to seal a treaty to succeed the landmark Kyoto Protocol, whose obligations to cut carbon emissions expire in 2012.

"Of course we are not going to have a full-fledged binding treaty, Kyoto-type, by Copenhagen," Barroso told reporters. "This is obvious. There is no time for that."

An international meeting next year in Mexico could be used to finalize a treaty, but Barroso said Copenhagen needed to come up with the framework of the deal, and that the world's largest economy in particular should take a lead role.

"What we are asking is the United States to show leadership in this, such an important issue," Barroso said.

After meeting with Obama he stressed that "I am more confident now" about Washington's commitment, but he also warned against protracted negotiations akin to the stalled Doha round of trade liberalization talks.

"Let's not do to Copenhagen what has been happening with trade in Doha, where systematically every year we are postponing," Barroso said.

Sweden's Reinfeldt said the United States should at least agree on targets for cutting emissions and on financing for developing nations.

"I said that we need to have a clear commitment on targets and on financing coming from the United States," Reinfeldt told AFP after talks with key senators.

"We can understand if it's not possible to have everything in place exactly now. But we want a full agreement in Copenhagen and we are able to work through details in the months that come after Copenhagen," he said.

Reinfeldt spoke as pre-summit negotiations were underway in Barcelona, Spain, where divisions again ran deep between key developed nations and emerging economies.

An EU summit last week agreed that developing nations will need 100 billion euros (146 billion dollars) per year by 2020 to tackle climate change, but failed to nail down how much it would give.

The US role in Copenhagen is overshadowed by the debate in Congress.

The House of Representatives in June narrowly passed the plan to curb carbon emissions by 17 percent by 2020 but the bill -- already criticized by other developed nations as not ambitious enough -- is bogged down in the Senate, where a slightly more ambitious version calls for a 20-percent cut by 2020.

related report
Climate talks resume but hopes fade for a Copenhagen treaty
Climate talks in Barcelona resumed on Wednesday after an angry spat but negotiators admitted chances for sealing a hoped-for UN treaty on global warming by year's end had almost vanished.

"The impasse that we had yesterday seems to have been overcome and we are indeed content with that," said Anders Turesson, chief negotiator for Sweden, which holds the European Union (EU) presidency.

Work on one of the twin tracks under negotiation slammed to a halt on Tuesday after African countries staged a boycott.

The bloc of some 50 nations accused rich counterparts of backsliding on promises to curb man-made carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

It demanded they slash their pollution by at least 40 percent by 2020 over 1990 levels.

The squabble blocked talks among countries that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the cornerstone pact of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

It did not affect the other path of the UNFCCC negotiations, which includes the United States, the big Kyoto holdout.

Under a behind-the-scenes deal, delegates agreed to devote more time to scrutinising emissions cuts in a panel under the Kyoto track.

"Work has resumed fully in the contact group," said Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping of Sudan, for the Group of 77 bloc of developing countries.

"We are guardedly optimistic, and indeed a degree of focus (on emissions reductions) is something we can record we have started to witness, and that's a very important indication."

UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer told AFP the problem "has been temporarily settled."

He cautioned, though: "Unless we see some substantial movement from industrial countries on targets and finance, the problem will remain the same today as it was yesterday."

The twin-track process was launched in Bali in 2007 with the goal of concluding a post-2012 treaty among the UNFCCC's 192 parties at a December 7-18 showdown in Copenhagen.

But negotiations have been hamstrung over how to apportion emissions curbs between rich countries and developing giants.

Another headache is how to muster hundreds of billions of dollars to wean poor countries off carbon-intensive technology and strengthen their defences against climate change.

Artur Runge-Metzger, the European Commission's chief negotiator, said there was still only a "fragmented" view as to what countries were offering in these extremely complex issues.

"We will probably only have the full picture in the last days of Copenhagen, maybe even only during the last night... the (emission) numbers and the financial figures are probably, politically, the hardest part of the entire deal," he said.

Runge-Metzger insisted the EU "will still be pushing to come to a legally binding, or let's say a fully-fledged, treaty.

"But we hear more and more voices, including some of our political leaders, who say maybe time has run out and we need to look for something as a kind of a framework agreement which will allow for immediate action after Copenhagen, and then side by side you can continue to talk on the fully-fledged treaty and you can conclude that in the next year.

"I think these things that are being discussed openly at the present point in time," he said.

European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said in Washington on Tuesday it was "obvious" that a "full-fledged binding treaty, Kyoto-type" could not be completed in Copenhagen.

He hoped for a framework agreement at Copenhagen that would then be fleshed out in later negotiations, but warned against a protracted process akin to the stalled Doha round of global trade liberalization talks.

Di-Aping, at a press conference, heaped scorn on any "political" deal that was devoid of legal teeth.

Developing countries had a well-founded suspicion about rich countries, he said.

"Tell me of any politician who delivers on his political manifesto," he asked. "Is it (British Prime Minister) Gordon Brown? Is it (Australian Prime Minister) Kevin Rudd?"

Share This Article With Planet Earth

del.icio.us	Digg	Reddit
YahooMyWeb	Google	Facebook

Related Links
Climate Science News - Modeling, Mitigation Adaptation

Memory Foam Mattress Review

SPACE MEDIA NETWORK PROMOTIONS Solar Energy Solutions Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison ... Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News