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Britain blames China over 'farcical' climate talks
AFP - Tuesday, December 22
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Britain blames China over 'farcical' climate talks
LONDON (AFP) - – British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Monday accused countries of holding the UN climate summit to ransom as bitter recriminations swirled over the outcome of the negotiations.
Summit host, Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen, admitted leaders had been left with too much to do by their negotiators while Britain said the meeting had lurched into farce and pointed the finger of blame at China.
Brown warned that lessons must be learned from the way the negotiations were carried out.
"Never again should we face the deadlock that threatened to pull down those talks. Never again should we let a global deal to move towards a greener future be held to ransom by only a handful of countries," he said.
While Brown refrained from naming countries, his climate change minister Ed Miliband said China had led a group of countries that "hijacked" the negotiations which had at times presented "a farcical picture to the public".
The agreement finally put together by a select group of leaders set no target for greenhouse-gas emissions cuts and is not legally binding -- omissions Miliband blamed on Beijing.
"We did not get an agreement on 50 percent reductions in global emissions by 2050 or on 80 percent reductions by developed countries," Miliband wrote in The Guardian newspaper.
"Both were vetoed by China, despite the support of a coalition of developed and the vast majority of developing countries." Miliband's aides told The Guardian that Sudan, Bolivia and other left-wing Latin American governments were included in the criticism.
China, the world's top polluter, resisted pressure for outside scrutiny of its emissions. It has given the warmest welcome to the accord.
"With the efforts of all parties, the summit yielded significant and positive results," Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said in a statement.
France's Prime Minister Francois Fillon, on a visit to Beijing, trod delicately but he showed Europe's frustration with the outcome.
"France, like all of the European Union, would have wanted the Copenhagen Accord to go a bit further," he said, while adding that the agreement should serve as a stepping stone for a more comprehensive agreement.
His comments echoed those of US President Barack Obama who acknowledged that all of the world's polluters would quickly have to do more after the "extremely difficult and complex negotiations" needed in Copenhagen.
Rasmussen, who came in for widespread criticism over his stewardship of the summit of around 130 leaders, said the agreement was "better than nothing".
The Dane said the conference had become quagmired before the arrival of the leaders for Friday's finale with lower-level negotiators having made neglible progress since its start on December 7.
"Without the intervention of heads of state, there would not have been an agreement," Rasmussen told Danish television. "Before their arrival, the negotiators were at an impasse.
"When the leaders arrived, there was not even a framework agreement to discuss and we had 24 hours, which is too little time, to create a text which should have been negotiated during the two weeks of the conference," he added.
As failure loomed, Rasmussen helped steer negotiations involving the leaders of the United States, China, India, Brazil and South Africa and major European countries that resulted in the final agreement.
The accord promised 100 billion dollars for poor nations that risk bearing the brunt of the global warming fallout, and it set a commitment to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit).
That however stopped short of the demand for a 1.5 degree limit low-lying island nations whose existence is threatened by rising sea levels.
Scientists say hundreds of millions of people are threatened in the next few decades by worsening drought, floods, storms and rising sea levels as a result of the rise in Earth's temperature.
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