BALI, Indonesia (AP) - The battle over whether to include greenhouse gas emissions guidelines in the "roadmap" for a new climate accord intensified Tuesday, with the Europeans and environmentalists clamoring for targets against opposition by the U.S. and others.
Talks at the U.N. climate change conference, now in its second week, stepped up Tuesday with the arrival of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Australia's new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, who signed onto the Kyoto Protocol on global warming just last week.
Delegates from 190 nations have been trying to hammer out a roadmap for negotiations for a pact to succeed Kyoto when it expires in 2012. But countries rich and poor, from starkly different political and social histories, have struggled with the wording for the text.
In one of the first concrete results of the talks, negotiators agreed on the oversight structure of a fund to help developing countries build seawalls and take other steps to adapt to the effects of climate change.
A draft of the final document notes - in a nonbinding way - a widely accepted view that reductions of 25 percent to 40 percent in industrialized nations' overall emissions would be required by 2020, calling for even deeper cuts later.
The United States is resisting inclusion of the language. But Stavros Dimas, the European commissioner for environment, said it was crucial to preventing global temperatures from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels.
"We need this range of reductions by developed countries," he told reporters Tuesday. "Science tells us that these reductions are necessary. Logic requires that we listen to science."
The European Union has committed itself to 20 percent to 30 percent reductions below 1990 levels by 2020.
Chief U.S. negotiator Harlan Watson has argued against including the targets, saying it would be premature to set goals - even nonbinding ones - at the opening of what is expected to be at least two years of negotiation toward a post-Kyoto agreement.
The U.S. is expected to win out, since Bali's decisions require consensus, and the final "Bali roadmap" is expected to be what has been long anticipated - a vague, broad mandate for two years of negotiations on Kyoto's successor.
U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer said the range was only meant to guide subsequent negotiations, but that including it was not vital. He said the most important goals for Bali were to set an agenda and a deadline for subsequent talks, not set targets.
Australia, despite its sudden embrace of the Kyoto pact, has shied away from supporting the interim target range. Canada and Japan also oppose inclusion of the suggested figures.
Environmentalists urged them to reconsider.
"This is not the direction we need to be going in. The stakes are too high for this kind of political games," said Alden Meyer, of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
On the fund to help countries adapt to global warming, delegates decided to allow the Global Environment Facility - a U.N. body that helps developing countries with environmental projects - to run the fund, though some countries say the facility is slow in distributing money.
The GEF has only about $60 million, though the World Bank has estimated some tens of billions of dollars a year will be needed for adaptation. Nothing has been done at Bali to develop new sources of revenue.
The struggle over targets coincided with the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Kyoto accord on Dec. 11, 1997, in Japan. The U.N. cut up a giant birthday cake to mark the occasion. The Kyoto pact requires 36 industrial nations to reduce carbon dioxide and other industrial, transportation and agricultural gases blamed for global warming by an average five percent below 1990 levels in the next five years.
The U.S. is the only major industrial nation to reject Kyoto. President George W. Bush contended the emissions cuts would harm the U.S. economy, and should have been imposed on China, India and other fast-growing poorer economies.
