European leaders and environmental campaigners reacted angrily yesterday after the United States rejected guidelines for reducing greenhouse gas emissions intended to check global warming.

The proposal, supported by the members of the European Union as well as Brazil, would have set out in writing an ambition to cut greenhouse gases produced by industrialised countries by up to two fifths in the next 13 years. The emissions cut would have been non-binding and subject to future negotiation, but even this was too much for the US, which opposes any reference to specific numerical goals in advance of more detailed negotiations next year.

The row has undermined the hopes of environmentalists for a strong and detailed statement of agreement among the 190 governments attending the United Nations climate change conference on the Indonesian island of Bali. They fear that without a reference to percentage targets, however non-commital, the “road map” to be agreed by environment ministers will amount to little more than an agenda and a broad timetable for negotiation.

Many doubt that there will be time to finalise a binding agreement by the projected deadline in 2009. “I do not need a paper from Bali in which we only say, ‘OK, we'll meet next year again',” Sigmar Gabriel, the German Environment Minister, said. “How we can find a roadmap without having a target, without having a goal?”

BACKGROUND

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BACKGROUND

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• Al Gore calls for climate ‘mobilisation’

• Carbon emissions are 'higher than claimed'

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BACKGROUND

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Stephanie Tunmore, a climate campaigner with the environmental group Greenpeace said: “We may end up at the end of this week with a pie which has no meat in it, and that would be disastrous. The science is telling us that we don't have time for this.”

After a week and a half of preparatory talks by civil servants, the environment ministers embarked yesterday afternoon on the final three days of intensive negotiations which are expected to run into the early hours of Saturday morning. The EU says that it will continue to demand the inclusion of specific emission goals in the final document.

But many participants in the talks, including the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki Moon, and Britain's environment secretary, Hilary Benn, indicated yesterday that the most important thing was to make sure that the US remained part of the negotiating process — even if that meant compromising the content of the final document.

The US insists that developing countries must also make large cuts in their own emissions. China and India point out that historically they have contributed almost nothing to the creation of the problem and argue that the long established industrial giants have an obligation to bear most of the burden.

Many delegates appear to be negotiating in the hope that President Bush will be succeeded in 2009 by a president more willing to accede to cuts in greenhouse gases — just as Australia's new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has immediately signed up to the Kyoto Protocol. “Politics is changing in lots of parts of the world rally fast,” Mr Benn said. “This is about not shutting the door on anybody ... and the in the course of the next two years, well, other things are going to probably change as well.”

The “road map” being negotiated this week is intended to lead to a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the first treaty to impose on its signatories legally binding cuts in greenhouse gases, which expires at the end of 2012. The negotiations were given urgency by the publication last month of a report by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which gave warning of irreversible catastrophe caused by global warming if greenhouse emissions are not rapidly reduced.

The IPCC, which was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last week, gave warning that devastating climatic effects including floods, droughts and hurricanes will accompany unhindered global warming. It concluded that it was possible to limit average temperature rises to 2.4C by the middle of the century, but only if carbon emissions peak by 2015 and then start to decline. It calculated that, in order to achieve this, industrialised countries should reduce their greenhouse emissions by between 25 and 40 per cent compared with 1990 levels by 2020 - this is the figure which the EU wishes to see in this week's document.

Numerical goals on emissions are not the only way in which Bali has fallen short of environmentalists' hope. So far, there has been no agreement on another proposal supported by developing countries for a “technology fund” which would pay private companies to share with up and coming economies innovations which would reduce their emissions.

The conference has not been entirely fruitless, however. It has agreed to activate a fund that will provided money for what is called “adaptation” — helping countries already affected by climate change to counteract its effects by building sea barriers and relocating populations, for example. According to the UN Development Program, anti-disaster measures in the UK alone cost six times more than the amounts spent in all poor countries combined.

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