UK upbeat at climate talks

UK flooding has focused attention on global warming

By Environment correspondent Alex Kirby in The Hague

UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott says he will do what he can to achieve success at the UN climate conference.

It's a mistake to suggest that The Hague will have failed if it doesn't do everything

Eileen Claussen, Pew Center

Mr Prescott said the problem was to reach a global agreement on ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, the international climate treaty.

He told BBC News Online: "Three years ago at Kyoto, the UK secured for itself the trust and understanding of people involved, and I hope we can use that here to help to produce a result."

He said it was still a question of trying to negotiate agreement between the US, the European Union and the Group of 77, representing many of the developing countries.

"These talks are the place where people go eyeball to eyeball, and then go behind the scenes and get a common agreement", Mr Prescott said.

Carbon sales

One of the deepest divisions in the talks has opened up between the EU and the US over how to achieve the cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases set by the protocol.

John Prescott: US must be part of the solution

The Americans want to be able to meet much of their reduction target, not by reducing their own actual emissions, but by off-setting pollution through certain flexible mechanisms allowed under the protocol.

The terms of the protocol allow countries to buy emission rights from others which have already met their targets, and the US wants to buy carbon permits from Russia and Ukraine, whose economic plight means they cannot possibly cause all the pollution to which they are "entitled".

The US also wants to use forests at home and abroad to count against its emissions, because trees absorb carbon while they are growing.

Global solution

And as the US does not want to set a limit to the use it can make of such schemes, its critics say it is promising to make purely notional emissions cuts, which will do nothing to reduce greenhouse gases.

Greenpeace activists protest at an Amsterdam power station

Mr Prescott said: "If you want a global solution, and the US - which emits 25% of the world's greenhouse gases - isn't part of the agreement, then that's not much of a solution."

Some environmental groups are arguing that the US stance will make it impossible to achieve a worthwhile result at The Hague - a final agreement that will allow the protocol to be ratified and put into effect. They say the Americans will agree only to a deal that protects their narrowly defined interests and is environmentally too weak to be worthwhile.

Although there is at least tacit support for this view from several European delegations, an influential US private group, the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, thinks it is mistaken.

'Slower and agree'

The Pew Center's president, Eileen Claussen, is a former assistant secretary of state, who was responsible for developing US climate change policy at the State Department. She told BBC News Online: "It's totally unrealistic to think that everything can be resolved here, or that it has to be.

"It's a mistake to suggest that The Hague will have failed if it doesn't do everything. You must not allow the best to become the enemy of the good."

She said she believed the US and the EU were very far apart on the role of forests and other carbon sinks, as they are known in the conference jargon.

"I'd rather go slower and agree on the things that are environmentally good, economically efficient and practical," Ms Claussen said. "The US will be on a slower track whatever's agreed here."