NUSA DUA, Indonesia (AFP) — Marathon talks on climate change were poised early Saturday for a deal that would spur US involvement in the fight to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, delegates said.
The UN-led talks on the Indonesian island of Bali took a break at around 2:00am Saturday (1800 GMT Friday) with most issues settled but dispute remaining on how far to commit rich and poor nations to slash the emissions warming the planet.
The discussions were scheduled to resume at 8:00am Saturday (0000 GMT), giving exhausted delegates and throngs of weary assembled media barely time to snooze.
"We have a compromise, which is a good situation for everybody," German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said without expanding.
Senior US negotiator Harlan Watson, asked how talks were going, said: "Swimmingly."
The 190-nation conference headed deep into overtime after the United States and European Union (EU) feuded over the framework for accelerating the fight against climate change beyond 2012.
But the atmosphere brightened in the last scheduled hours of the 12-day conference, said Yvo de Boer, the chief UN official on climate change.
"On the brink of agreement, I think, absolutely not deadlocked," de Boer said. "People are working hard to resolve outstanding issues."
In an unexpected move, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, on a visit to East Timor, said he would fly to Bali to address the conference on Saturday.
The biggest obstacle at the talks had been on how ambitious to be on slashing carbon gas emissions, which are blamed for heating up the globe's surface and disrupting its delicate climate system.
Nobel-winning UN scientists this year warned the "greenhouse effect" could intensify natural disasters, with potentially catastrophic consequences decades from now for millions of people.
A draft text obtained by AFP calls for both rich and poor nations to take "measurable, reportable and verifiable" steps to fight climate change.
The United States is the only industrial nation to reject the Kyoto Protocol, with President George W. Bush arguing that it would be too costly for the world's largest economy and biggest emitter.
The European Union (EU) had fought for the Bali conference to mention an "ambition" by which industrialised countries would slash their emissions by 25 to 40 percent by 2020 compared with 1990 levels.
But in the draft text, US pressure relegated these figures to the status of an indirect reference of a footnote -- and the "ambition" refers only to parties that are members of Kyoto, thus excluding the United States.
Washington had insisted that the EU proposal would prejudge the negotiations for the great post-2012 pact. Piqued, the Europeans had warned that they would snub a meeting that Bush called for next month in Hawaii if the Bali text was too weak.
Gabriel, the German negotiator, said: "I think this must be possible for everybody to accept, but I don't know, we will see tomorrow (Saturday) morning."
Environmentalists, though, immediately said they would not accept the deal.
"It's important to have the US in, but should it involve the US at any price?" said Greenpeace political chief Shane Rattenbury.
"The Bush administration still says that if you want to play, you have to do it our way, which is really code for not doing anything," he said.
On Thursday, new Nobel peace laureate Al Gore blasted US tactics and urged the rest of the world to sidestep Washington, predicting the next US president to be elected next year would change position.
But de Boer, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) organising the talks, said that no-one wanted to create an "unborn Kyoto II" that failed to include the United States, the world's biggest economy and No. 1 carbon polluter.
All sides said they had yet to work out language with developing countries -- a bloc that includes China, the world's second biggest emitter after the United States -- which have no binding obligations to cut greenhouse-gas pollution under Kyoto.
Fernando Tudela, a senior Mexican official, said the Bali talks looked set to postpone some thorny issues until 2009, when the post-2012 pact is scheduled to be sealed in Copenhagen.
"The mother of all battles will be in 2009," he said. "This is just a warm-up."
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