Bali Island, Indonesia - Negotiations reached an impasse at the UN climate talks in Bali Friday as the US and the European Union remain divided over setting specific 2020 guidelines for developed nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Executive Secretary of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer, gestures as he talks to media during a press conference in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia on 14 December 2007. Negotiators at climate talks in Bali on Friday struggled to break a deadlock over U.S. objections to goals for cutting emissions by dropping a reference to a non-binding 2020 target in draft text. EPA/MADE NAGI
'We continue to insist on including a reference to an indicative emissions reduction range for developed countries for 2020,' the EU's Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said on the final day of the 12-day conference.
As the 6 pm (1000 GMT) deadline passed without an agreement, Indonesia's Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar said meetings were 'ongoing,' and that the negotiations would continue Friday evening.
'All parties are willing to be flexible to reach a compromise. we are sure that we are able to reach an agreement but also to have ambitious guidelines,' German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said. ''The tone at the climate conference has changed into positive. The Americans are now more flexible.'
Hours earlier, the UN's climate chief Yvo de Boer told reporters that 'wise ministers will have booked their planes no earlier than Saturday evening.'
'I'm hearing interventions that judging by their length and technical detail would probably have been more appropriate for the first day of a two-week conference rather than the last day,' said Boer.
A major sticking point for environment ministers from nearly 180 countries is the US opposition to including specific targets in the framework for two years of negotiations to conclude in 2009 and implemented in 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol expires.
The EU, backed by developing countries, environmental groups and small island states, wants industrialised countries to commit to emissions cuts of 25 to 40 per cent of their 1990 levels by 2020 in the guidelines for those talks.
On Thursday the EU threatened to boycott any US-sponsored talks on climate change outside of the UN, stating it would be meaningless to have a major economies' meeting 'if we would have a failure in Bali.'
The 16-nation talks are set to take place next month under a framework inaugurated in September by US President George W Bush.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) explained that the US proposal replaces the binding reductions with text that calls upon countries to adopt any measures they deem appropriate.
'At the 11th hour the US has submitted a proposal that is the equivalent of taking no action at all against climate change,' said James P Leape, WWF's international director-general. 'This proposal would gut the international effort towards halting climate change and put the future of our planet at risk.'
The US proposal is 'outrageous and unfair,' said Marcelo Furtado of Greenpeace. The environment organization urged the EU not to deviate from its position.
Former US vice president and Nobel Laureate Al Gore blamed the US Thursday for blocking progress, urging delegates to forge ahead without the world's leading economy.
'I am going to speak an inconvenient truth. My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali. We all know that,' Gore said.
Delegates also wrangled over whether to mention scientific evidence for the need for emissions cuts as part of the guidelines for the talks.
The issue had taken on new urgency with the publication of a report last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warning of irreversible catastrophe caused by global warming if greenhouse emissions are not rapidly reduced.
An agreement to reduce emissions by 2020 and a clear timetable by which the numbers have to be decided on would be 'progress' IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri told reporters in Bali after arriving from Oslo where he collected the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of his UN panel.
The talks have produced an 'adaptation' fund for financial transfers to developing states most severely affected by rising sea levels, desertification and other fallout from climate change.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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