BALI, Indonesia - In a largely symbolic duel over numbers, the United States on Monday resisted efforts at the UN climate conference to suggest that upcoming negotiations consider a specific range of targets for sharp cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions.
A proposed text for the Bali conference's final document notes -- in a nonbinding way -- a widely accepted view that reductions of 25 to 40 per cent in richer nations' emissions would be required by 2020, and even deeper cuts later, to head off the worst of global warming.
"It's important to give a clear signal that that's where industrialized countries intend to go,'' the UN climate chief, Yvo de Boer, told reporters.
The European Union, which pushed for this mention of potential targets, has itself committed to 20 to 30 per cent reductions below 1990 levels by 2020.
But the chief U.S. negotiator said that because of "many uncertainties,'' raising such specific numbers would limit the scope of future talks.
"To start with a predetermined answer, we don't think is an appropriate thing to do,'' Harlan Watson said.
The United States is expected to win out, since Bali's decisions require consensus, and the final "Bali roadmap'' is expected to be what has been long anticipated -- a vague, broad mandate for two years of negotiations on an agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.
The 1997 pact requires 36 industrial nations to reduce carbon dioxide and other industrial, transportation and agricultural gases blamed for global warming by an average five per cent below 1990 levels in the next five years.
The United States is the only major industrial nation to reject Kyoto. U.S. President George W. Bush contended the emissions cuts would harm the American economy and should have been imposed on China, India and other fast-growing poorer economies.
The rest of the world hopes to enlist the United States in the next, post-Kyoto phase of internationally binding greenhouse-gas reductions. The change in U.S. administrations after next November's presidential election is expected to introduce a new attitude on climate change.
The talks here, in the second of two weeks, are expected to intensify with Tuesday's arrival of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who has made climate his top priority, and Australia's new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who reversed his country's stand and ratified the Kyoto Protocol last week.
U.S. Senator John Kerry, a longtime supporter of action on climate change, flew into Bali for a day's rapid-fire meetings Monday, at which he told delegates he expects the January 2009 change at the White House to end the U.S. isolation on climate.
In an Associated Press interview, Kerry said he favoured the mention of the 25-to-40 per cent target range in the document to be adopted here Friday. "I believe you need to be relatively specific in the context of what Kyoto has already set out,'' he said.
A spokeswoman for the main coalition of environmental groups here viewed the numbers dispute as central. "This will show whether governments are serious or not,'' said Jennifer Morgan.
But the 25-to-40-per cent reference was included only in the nonbinding preamble of the "draft decision,'' and not in the decisional paragraphs, where such numbers would impose an obligation on negotiators to limit their discussions to that range.
In fact, the environmentalists' daily bulletin in Bali commented that it "believes that these numbers belong in the operative part of the text, not in the preamble.''
The proposed text also includes a vague reference to emissions reductions by developing countries -- the most important of which are big emitters China and India. In the upcoming negotiations, the willingness of such fast-developing nations to rein in the growth of their emissions will be key to winning agreement to deeper, binding reductions by richer nations.
