India's environment minister warned Sunday that there was little prospect of a breakthrough in efforts to forge an international agreement this year to fight global warming. "So far as negotiations are concerned... the prospects of a breakthrough in 2010 are very, very remote," Jairam Ramesh told reporters during a visit to China, the world's largest greenhouse gas polluter.
A new UN conference is due to be held in the Mexican resort of Cancun towards the end of the year to try to build on an accord hammered out at marathon talks in Copenhagen that were widely regarded as a failure.
"I don't see any silver lining or any silver bullet anywhere which is going to lead to an agreement," said Ramesh, whose country gave its formal backing to the Copenhagen accord only last month. "We may have a political statement in Mexico, in Cancun, we may have a little more detailing of the Copenhagen accord... but if you ask me whether we will have an international agreement in Cancun, the answer is no." The much-criticised December conference in Copenhagen fell spectacularly short of delivering the binding treaty that nearly all nations say is needed to spare the planet from the worst ravages of global warming.
All the major players seem to have given up on the goal of a treaty by year's end that would spell out the path for reducing emissions enough to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the target of the Copenhagen Accord.
One of the major hurdles is a disagreement between the United States and China - the world's two top greenhouse gas emitters - on slashing carbon dioxide emissions. Developing nations have resisted a legally binding treaty, arguing that wealthy nations bear primary responsibility for climate change. "The co-operation between India and China was one of the remarkable features of the Copenhagen conference," Ramesh noted.
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