Rudd urges US to limit pollution

New Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd today urged America to follow his country’s climate change lead and agree to limit its greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr Rudd signed documents this week to formally adopt the Kyoto protocol, reversing a decade of Australian resistance and leaving the US as the only industrialised country not to have binding targets.

“Our position vis-à-vis Kyoto is clear cut, and that is that all developed and developing countries need to be part of the global solution,” he said.

“And therefore we do need to see the United States as a full ratification state,” he said.

His comments put further pressure on the US at the UN Climate Change conference on Bali , where nearly 190 nations hope to launch a serious two-year negotiating process that will eventually result in a pact to ward off climate change.

Failure to do so, experts warn, could lead to catastrophic droughts and floods, melting ice caps, sinking islands and deaths linked to heat waves and disease.

The 175-nation Kyoto Protocol of 1997 requires 36 industrialised nations to reduce their emissions of heat-trapping “greenhouse gases” – carbon dioxide and some other industrial, agricultural and transportation by-products – by an average 5% below 1990 levels by 2012.

The United States says it wants to be part of the negotiations on a follow-up accord, but refuses to endorse mandatory cuts in emissions favoured by the European Union, choosing instead to focus on funding renewable energy projects and improving energy efficiency.

While the conference is in its early days, differences were already emerging, mostly over what should go into the “Bali roadmap,” which will lay out the subjects for discussions in the years to come. Japan, for one, offered a proposal that does not include targets, while the EU has come out with a detailed wish list that includes demands for industrialised countries to take the lead in approving mandatory cuts, strengthening the carbon market and boosting funding to help poor countries adapt.

Meanwhile, delegates and activists say poor countries led by the Group of 77, which represents 132 mainly developing countries and China, have demanded that rich countries speed up the process of providing them with clean technologies such as solar and wind and funds to adapt to the impact of global warming.

Meena Raman, chairman of Friends of the Earth International, said marathon debates over the issue, some running late into the night, indicated that the West was not taking their concerns seriously.

“How on earth can you talk about targets if you don’t want to engage on the scope, the depth and need of technology?” she asked.

“In the last two days, the sincerity and urgency that is needed and goodwill from the (West) is not happening.”