UN doubts China will overtake US on carbon by 2009

BEIJING, Feb 6 (Reuters) A forecast that China could be the world's top emitter of carbon dioxide by 2009 is based on old data and Beijing is unlikely to overtake the United States so soon, United Nations and Chinese officials today said.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned that China's emissions of greenhouse gases could top the global list before 2010 if it does not change the way it fuels its double-digit annual economic growth.

But Khalid Malik, head of the UN delegation in China, said that later data led him to expect that China would not take the top place so quickly.

''The more recent figures are more optimistic,'' Malik told journalists on the sidelines of a conference to launch a new emissions reduction investment scheme that includes a Beijing-based carbon trading exchange.

Malik declined to provide alternative figures, but the United Nations is working with the Chinese government on an assessment of its emissions, the UN's Energy and Environment head in China, Kishan Khoday, told Reuters.

On a per-person basis China's emissions are far lower than those of the United States and other industrialised nations, but its inefficient factories and booming demand for power, which largely comes from coal-fired plants, is pushing them up fast.

Beijing has pledged to cut the amount of energy used to generate each dollar of national income 20 per cent by 2010, and a leading climate change official said that government policies were helping reduce emissions growth rates.

''Emissions in China will continue to increase... but efforts made by the government will slow down this increase,'' Lu Xuedu, deputy director of the Office of Global Environmental Affairs, told the Beijing conference.

''The estimation made by the IEA that emissions from China will go over the United States before 2010 in my judgement, that may not be the case,'' he added.

The foreign ministry also said today that wealthy countries bore most blame for the greenhouse gases causing rising temperatures and should lead the way in cutting emissions.

''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,'' spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a regular news briefing.

REUTERS SY PM1910