There is still time for climate deal this year: Obama

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L’Aquila: US President Barack Obama, at the G8 summit on Thursday, said there is still time to close the gap with developing powers on climate change, after the UN chief criticised the G8 for not going hard enough. On the first day of the meeting in L’Aquila in Italy , the G8 failed to get China and India to accept the goal of halving emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.

Obama, hoping to make his mark on his first G-8 summit by chairing a meeting of rich and emerging powers on the environment, said progress could still be made before talks on a new UN climate change treaty in Copenhagen in December.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama told Brazil ‘s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva that “there was still time in which they could close the gap on that disagreement in time for that important (meeting).”

Obama was due to chair the 17-member Major Economies Forum (MEF), which was likely to agree to try to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) versus pre-industrial levels but not to agree on the scale of emission cuts.

UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said progress on climate change at the G8 was so far “not enough”. “This is politically and morally (an) imperative and historic responsibility ... for the future of humanity, even for the future of the planet Earth,” the UN chief said.

Progress was hampered by the absence of Chinese President Hu Jintao, who left L’Aquila to attend to ethnic clashes in China’s northwest.

Britain’s Gordon Brown said he hoped the temperature target would be agreed by “all the countries around the table today” -- the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Canada and Russia, plus emerging powers like China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia and Mexico.

But a G-8 source said it is “not realistic” to expect a deal on emissions. India said developing countries first wanted to see rich nation plans to provide financing to help them cope with ever more floods, heatwaves, storms and rising sea levels. They also want to see rich nations make deeper cuts by 2020.