Isramart :No deal on CO2 cuts as climate talks enter final day

Isramart news:
Negotiators from 193 countries worked through the night and did reach consensus on financing and temperature. A draft text called for $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor nations cope with climate change and sought to limit warming to two degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels.

But large gaps remained.

Andreas Carlgren, the environment minister of EU president Sweden, said only the world's two biggest greenhouse gas emitters China and the United States could unlock a deal.

"There are deep differences in opinion and views on how we should solve this. We'll try our best, until the last minutes of this conference," said Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt.

U.S. President Barack Obama arrived on Friday morning, and would meet Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on the sidelines.

"Through the whole process the real problem has been on the one hand the United States, who are not able to deliver sufficiently (and) on the other hand China, and they delivered less. And they have been really blocking again and again in this process, followed by a group of oil states. That's the real difference, the real confrontation behind this," said Carlgren.

At stake is an agreement for coordinated global action to avert climate changes including more floods and droughts.

Two weeks of talks in the Danish capital have battled intense suspicion between rich and poor countries over how to share out emissions cuts. Developing countries say rich nations have a historic responsibility to take the lead.

Negotiators agreed on an initial draft which called for a two degree Celsius cap on global temperatures, compared with pre-industrial levels, and at least $100 billion in aid for poor nations, sources said.

Scientists say a 2 degrees limit is the minimum effort to avoid some of the worst impacts of climate change including several metres sea level rise, extinctions and crop failures.

DESPERATE

Any final Copenhagen outcome could also include $30 billion in climate funds for least developed countries over and above a possible $100 billion a year funding by 2020 to help developing nations prepare for climate change and cut carbon emissions.

But the all-night meeting broke up in the morning without a deal on the central element of a climate deal - the timing and degree of cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

"It's still not there, it's confusing," said a European delegate.

"The situation is desperate," said a top Indian negotiator emerging from the talks to agree a text that could form the basis of a political statement at the end of the Copenhagen negotiations.

"There is no agreement on even what to call the text - a declaration, a statement or whatever. They (rich nations) want to make it a politically binding document which we oppose."

Another developing nation negotiator told Reuters that rich nations were offering to cut their carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050, a proposal that had been rejected by developing nations. Developing nations have always insisted on the need for mid-term targets rather than long-term aspirations.

A further issue is trying to convince China and India, the world's top and fourth-largest carbon emitters, to allow outside scrutiny of pledged steps to curb their emissions.

The aim of the talks is to agree a climate deal which countries will convert into a full legally binding treaty next year, to succeed the Kyoto Protocol whose present round ends in 2012. The United States never ratified Kyoto, and the pact doesn't bind developing nations. (With extra reporting by Alister Doyle, Gerard Wynn, Anna Ringstrom, John Acher, Jeff Mason, Richard Cowan and Emma Graham-Harrison; Writing by Gerard Wynn; Editing by Janet McBride)