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Climate 'culprits' must do much more: China

China's top climate envoy warned that negotiations on a new treaty to fight global warming will fail if rich nations aren't treated as "the culprits" and developing countries as "the victims."

Ambassador Yu Qingtai (于慶泰) said all countries must take action to confront climate change -- but developed countries have a "historical responsibility" to do much more than developing countries because their unrestrained emissions over the past 100 years are responsible for global warming.

Yu said this principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" for developed and developing countries was accepted in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international treaty that began to consider what to do to reduce global warming.

It is enshrined in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which set binding targets on industrial countries to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases believed to cause global warming but exempted developing countries like China and India -- and it must be "the essential foundation" of the agreement that will replace Kyoto when it expires in 2012, he said.

"The developed countries is a grouping of the culprits, the countries who are responsible for the creation of this problem," Yu said in an interview this week on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly debate on climate change. "The developing countries is a grouping of victims ... [that] face the common task of achieving economic and social development so that their people can enjoy a better standard of living."

The Chinese envoy said the agreement by delegates from nearly 190 nations in December at a UN-brokered conference in Bali, Indonesia to adopt a blueprint to control global warming gases before the end of next year reiterated the principle of different responsibilities for rich and poor nations.

This principle must be the basis of a new agreement, he said.

"If this one is discarded, there is no international cooperation," Yu said. "People will just disperse and go their own ways and do their own things. So this principle is the very foundation for international cooperation."

The US and China are the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases that scientists say cause global warming.

The US has argued that it shouldn't have to cut its emissions to a level that would hurt the US economy as long as countries like China and India aren't required by a UN treaty to make similar cuts.

Yu vehemently disagreed, calling China "a victim" of climate change and stressing that its economy only started to grow in the last 25 years.

"The United States and the developed states as a whole are the countries that created the problem, caused the problem of climate change in the first place. In my view, that's what a culprit means," he said.

"It's not logical to ask China ... to cap its emissions or reduce its emissions in the same manner as a developed country is supposed to do," Yu said. "If that is the case, there will be no differentiation. The fundamental principal for international cooperation would no longer be there."

While the total amount of emissions in China and the US may be the same, he said China's population of 1.3 billion is four times the population of the US.

"No one can expect China to accept that an American, for no other reason than being born an American, should enjoy an emission entitlement right four times as [large as] the Chinese. That is not right. That is not fair," Yu said.

China on its own, without any international negotiations, has set targets to increase energy efficiency by 20 percent, to increase national forest cover from 18 percent to 20 percent between 2005 and 2010 by planting more trees and to increase the use of renewable sources of energy, especially solar power, from 7.5 percent to 10 percent by 2010, he said.

Meanwhile, he said, "the United States should take the lead to reduce its own emissions and fulfill its obligations as a party to the [Framework] Convention."
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