NUSA DUA, Indonesia (AFP) — Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has told Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao he is ready to help bridge the gap on cutting greenhouse gases, boosting UN climate change talks here Thursday.
According to the Australian newspaper, quoting an unidentified government source in Sydney, Rudd told Wen that he "is willing to act as an intermediary between China and the developed world."
"The Chinese premier also sought Mr Rudd's co-operation in future talks on the issue of climate change" during their 20-minute conversation in Mandarin, the national daily added.
The fresh signal came as nearly 190 nations meet in Bali, looking to take the first steps toward a new blueprint against climate change when the current phase of the Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012.
Rudd, who Monday began the process of ratifying the pact, told the Sydney Morning Herald's website he intended to use Australia's new position as a member of the Kyoto club to bridge the gap between developed and developing countries on future emissions controls.
"I fully recognise the difficulty of this because the distance between those two positions at present is enormous, but this is a gap which Australia in the past could not even hope to begin to bridge because we were not at the negotiating table at all in a substantive way," Rudd said.
However the premier, who is to attend the summit here on Indonesia's Bali next week, soft-pedalled on reports his government would support targets committing developed nations to cutting carbon emissions by 25 to 40 percent over the next 12 years.
"(Nations) have ... indicated that they do not necessarily accept those targets, nor do they accept those targets as binding targets for themselves," he said after his cabinet's first meeting.
"That is also the position of the Australian government."
Australia has stolen the limelight as the 11-day annual meeting here of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) kicked off this week.
Its move to ratify Kyoto leaves the United States as the lone rich nation snubbing the protocol, under which industrialised nations are obliged to reduce their 1990 greenhouse gas emission levels by five percent by 2012.
On Wednesday, an Australian delegate told the conference that Canberra also backed the outcomes of a meeting in Austria in August that recommended emissions cuts for developed nations of 25 to 40 percent.
Such cuts have been spelt out by the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as an option for policymakers seeking to keep global warming to less than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
Under its former conservative government, Australia had actively hindered progress at the Vienna meeting, according to activists.
The United States delegation meanwhile insisted they would not commit to deep emissions cuts during the talks here despite mounting global pressure to do so.
Harlan Watson, head of the US delegation, said that neither a recent US Senate committee move to limit greenhouse gas emissions nor the decision by Australia to ratify the Kyoto Protocol would influence their stance.
"We're not changing our position," he said.
Watson said the US was hoping to come up with its own set of figures on cuts when a meeting organised by US President George Bush of 17 nations that are major emitters of greenhouse gases takes place next year.
"We're not trying to detract from the United Nations process," he added.
Yvo de Boer, UNFCCC executive secretary, said all governments realised that industrialised nations must cut emissions by 25 to 40 percent by 2020, noting that the IPCC figure and its reports had "been subscribed to by the US".
"That's an agreed range for industrialised countries and generally accepted as the direction in which rich countries will have to go... if they are to create enough room for developing countries to continue to grow their economies," he added.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
