China says global warming in hands of wealthy nations

BEIJING, Feb 6 (Reuters) Rich nations are responsible for greenhouse gases fuelling global warming, China today said, urging them to cut emissions and deflecting questions about whether Beijing will accept limits.

Spokeswoman for China's Foreign Ministry, Jiang Yu, said Beijing was willing to contribute to curbing greenhouses gases from industry, agriculture and vehicles, which a UN scientific panel last week reported was almost certainly behind rising average temperatures threatening wrenching climate change.

But Jiang told a regular news briefing that wealthy countries bore the blame, and the solution lay in their hands.

''It must be pointed out that climate change has been caused by the long-term historic emissions of developed countries and their high per-capita emissions,'' she said.

''Developed countries bear an unshirkable responsibility,'' she said, adding that they should ''lead the way in assuming responsibility for emissions cuts''.

The expert panel gave a ''best estimate'' that temperatures would rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius in the 21st century, bringing deeper droughts, heatwaves and a rise in sea levels that could continue for over 1,000 years even if greenhouse gas emissions are capped.

Many environmental advocates have urged widening the UN Kyoto Protocol, which binds 35 industrial nations to cut emissions by 2012 but excludes developing nation emitters, including China and India, from specific targets.

But neither Jiang nor China's top climate official would directly say whether China would accept mandatory emissions caps, and instead urged more action and support from developed countries.

Qin Dahe, chief of the China Meteorological Administration, told a separate news conference that the country is committed to improving energy efficiency by 20 per cent in coming years, and to shifting the country from overwhelming dependence on coal, one of the main fuel sources of greenhouse gases.

''The government is very urgent about this demand,'' Qin said.

Qin, who was co-chairman of the U.N. expert panel, said China's leaders worried that global warming would undermine development goals.

''The Chinese government is taking climate change extremely seriously,'' he said. ''President Hu Jintao has said that climate change is not just an environmental issue but also a development issue, ultimately a development issue.'' But Qin did not directly answer whether China would accept a cap on emissions, instead stressing that the country needed support to buy clean-energy technology.

''As a developing country that's growing rapidly and has a big population, to thoroughly transform the energy structure and use clean energy would need a lot of money,'' Qin said.

China is hurtling towards possibly becoming the world's third-biggest economy by 2008, overtaking Germany and trailing only Japan and the United States. But that growth has been fuelled by coal-burning power stations and wheezing factories.

Qin cited data showing that in 2000 China was already the world's second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. But he could not provide more recent data.

''Unfortunately, I don't have information from the past few years at hand,'' he said. ''I think that maybe you can check these things in some magazines.'' REUTERS SY BD1543