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US downplays climate change talks at Copenhagen
Published on Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 13:29 in World section
Tags: Copenhagen Summit, Global Warming , Washington
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Washington: With a UN-sponsored climate conference in Copenhagen just weeks away, the White House is acknowledging that getting binding agreement for cutting greenhouse gases at the Summit is very unlikely.
As a result, the White House has announced a new goal.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, "Getting a political agreement out of Copenhagen after years and years and years of inaction on clear energy and climate change, the President would view as a very positive development."
To that end, a White House official told Reuters on Monday that the UN will propose an emissions reduction target in Copenhagen in line with proposals backed by UN congressional leaders.
While the UN House of Representatives has already passed a climate change bill, the Senate has yet to do so.
Dan Weiss is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said, "Next year, they're going to want to put together a bill that includes energy provisions and global warming pollution reductions and then they're gonna have to do an analysis of it. So it'll take until early March before that bill can come to the floor of the Senate."
On Monday the UN agency that tracks global weather said concentrations of greenhouse gases, the major cause of global warming, are at their highest levels ever recorded and still climbing.
The United States, the world's biggest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases, is a key player in the Copenhagen talks which will involve 65 world leaders. But it's still undecided whether President Obama will attend the December summit, which is slated to run over two weeks.
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