China's critical comments fuel climate feud

Industrialised countries are responsible for "a failure of major breakthroughs", says a senior Chinese official.

Industrialised countries are responsible for "a failure of major breakthroughs" during climate talks this week, says a senior Chinese official. Su Wei, the lead negotiator for China on climate change, yesterday ratcheted up a long-running dispute between China and industrialised countries, led by the US. The feud is widely recognised as the central hurdle to achieving an international consensus on global warming.

His comments came a day after the UN's top climate official called on China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions, to take a leading role in talks this week in the Chinese city of Tianjin as a run-up to a December summit in Mexico. Leaders of the world's richest countries have said the most serious effects of climate change cannot be averted if China does not take demonstrable steps to slow the increase of emissions from its fast-growing economy. China counters that it is willing to adopt such measures on a voluntary basis but opposes the creation of an international monitoring regime that would measure its domestic progress. Wealthier countries need to "dramatically" increase the scope of their promises to cut pollution, Mr Su said.

"Many of the developed countries, especially a handful of them, have been very laggard on climate change actions and this has led to failure of major breakthroughs or progress in the negotiations," he said. "We believe it is a positive thing that they put forward these targets but these targets are still far away from the expectations of developing countries and what is demanded by science." His comments came after Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said that China needed to take a leading role if the climate talks were to succeed.

"It is absolutely indispensable that China show leadership, to be accompanied by all other countries, to be flexible in order to be able to reach the compromises necessary for Cancun [summit in Mexico]," she said. China was publicly accused by western leaders of spoiling last December's talks in Copenhagen, Denmark. Beijing has vociferously denied the charge, pointing to the hundreds of millions of dollars it has invested in clean energy in the past two years and its pledge to improve the energy efficiency of its economy by 40 to 45 per cent by 2020.

This week's talks will separate issues "they see as do-able" from harder disputes that will take more time to resolve, Ms Figueres said. "Perhaps one of the strongest contrasts between this year's process and last year's process is that countries this year have realised they cannot build a tall building without first putting in place the foundations," she added.