China will not agree any form of binding target to reduce its soaring greenhouse gas emissions as part of a new international deal on climate change, a senior official confirmed yesterday.
Lu Xuedu, deputy director of the Chinese government's office of global environmental affairs, said it "was not the time" for China to consider binding commitments, and he criticised developed countries for playing what he called the "games of children" over global warming. But Mr. Xuedu said China had not ruled out binding targets in future. "For the time being we don't have that capability to make those commitments. We hope we will have that capability very soon but it depends on the development process," he said in evidence to the UK joint committee on climate change. "When we can take such binding commitments will depend on our capability, our economical development level."
According to experts at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, China has already overtaken the US as the world's biggest producer of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas. Finding a way to include China and the US in a new agreement on global warming to replace the Kyoto protocol is one of the key international challenges inherited by Gordon Brown as prime minister. President George Bush pulled the US out of the Kyoto process, partly because it placed no requirements on China.
detail: http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2120149,00.html