The UN climate chief predicted on Wednesday that the world will reach the goal of cutting global-warming gases 50 percent by 2050 and said the US economic meltdown should spur governments to take bolder action in confronting climate change.
But Yvo de Boer added that governments must move away from taking "small incremental steps" that won't achieve the goal and change direction -- as Norway did this month with the announcement that it will become "carbon neutral" by 2030.
Others warned that the technology to cut emissions still needs to be developed.
De Boer, who presided over last month's UN climate change conference in Bali, Indonesia, said nations can't be driven away from their agreement to adopt a blueprint for fighting global warming by next year because of the US financial turmoil.
"This is the time to be bold and really push through," he said, adding that some people "are going to suffer pain and other people are going to gain."
De Boer spoke to two reporters after moderating a panel at the World Economic Forum on climate change that included several energy company executives and Rajendra Pachauri, the chief UN climate scientist who chairs the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change which shared last year's Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore.
"We have the International Energy Agency telling us that if we continue with business as usual then greenhouse gas emissions will go up by 50 percent whereas Pachauri is telling us emissions need to go down by 50 percent," de Boer said.
He then asked the panel members whether they believed a 50 percent reduction would be achieved, or whether governments would "focus on short-term and lock us into technologies that will not get us to 50 percent."
James Rogers, chairman and chief executive of Duke Energy Corp, said he was "cautiously optimistic that we're able to achieve the objective of 50 percent reduction by 2050, but the key to that optimism is really investment in technology, because that's what's going to drive it."
In the short term to 2025, however, he said carbon dioxide emissions will continue to rise "because the technology is not going to be available," particularly for coal "which is such a key driver of emissions of CO2" in India, China and the US.
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