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US-led accord accepted

UN skirts bitter opposition to 'note' it as 'essential beginning'; no binding deal reached; hopes pinned on Mexico City meet next year

Afp, Bbc Online, Ap, Copenhagen
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon yesterday praised the deal at the Copenhagen climate summit as an "essential beginning" but admitted it did not achieve all that was hoped.
The UN climate conference narrowly escaped collapse Saturday as bitterly divided delegates agreed after all-night talks to recognise the political compromise that President Barack Obama brokered with China and other emerging powers.
But Obama admitted the so-called Copenhagen Accord did not go far enough. The deal puts off specific goals for cutting carbon emissions blamed for global warming which scientists warn will put entire species at riskif unchecked.
The Copenhagen Accord was bogged down for hours by protests from delegates who felt they were excluded from the process or said the
deal didn't go far enough in cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global wanning.
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After a break, the conference president gavelled a decision to "take note" of the agreement instead of formally approving it. Experts said that clears the way for the accord to begin even though it was not formally approved by the conference.
Ban was speaking after delegates passed a motion recognising the agreement, which the US reached with key nations including China and Brazil.
But Ban said the agreement must be made legally binding next year in Mexico City admitting that the agreement had failed to win global consensus and would disappointment many looking for stronger action against climate change.
UN chief voiced relief it had not been strangled at birth. "It may not be everything we hoped for, but this decision of the Conference of Parties is an essential beginning." he said.
"Many will say that it lacks ambition,' Ban said. "Nonetheless, you have achieved much."
The UN conference yesterday rammed through a battle plan against climate change forged by US President Barack Obama and other top leaders, sidelining smaller states, which lashed the deal as a betrayal.
After toxic exchanges through the night, the summit chair forced through a deal using a procedural tool that effectively dropped all obstacles to the Copenhagen Accord.
Ed Miliband, Britain's climate minister, said it was "an important start".
"This is a very significant moment because it indicates developed and developing countries are both signing up to the notion that they should say what they are going to do in terms of cutting carbon emissions," he told Sky television.
Obama earlier called the accord an "unprecedented breakthrough" after meetings with about two dozen presidents and prime ministers in Copenhagen.
But the deal was mauled when it was put to a full session of the 194-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Outraged developing countries blasted the document as a deal among the elite that violated the rules of UN democracy, excluded the poor and doomed the world to catastrophic climate change.
Verbal violence erupted when the draft was put to a full session of the UNFCCC.
Half a dozen developing countries led the charge, blasting the document as a cosy backdoor deal that vio-lated UN democracy, excluded the poor and doomed the world to catastrophic climate change.
"it looks like we are being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our people and our future," said lan Fry of Tuvalu, a tiny Pacific island whose very existence is threatened by rising seas.
In remarks that sparked immediate condemnation from Western nations, Sudan's outspoken delegate, Lumumba Stanislas Dia-ping who chairs a bloc of 130 poor nations, said the pact meant "incineration" for Africa and was comparable to the Holocaust.
The agreement was assem bled in a frenzied game of climate poker among the leaders of the United States. China. India, Brazil and South Africa and major European countries.
The group had been chosen by conference chair Denmark after it became clear the summit was in danger of failure.
The draft is intended to be the kernel of a strategy to slash the fossil-fuel emissions that trap the Sun's heat and are warming Earth's surface, slowly but ruthlessly damag-ingour weather systems.
It set a commitment to 1 limit global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), but did not spell out the important stepping stones - global emissions targets for 2020 or 2050 - for getting there.
It did not spell out a year by which emissions should peak, a demand made by rich countries that was fiercely opposed by China. And pledges were voluntary, without a tough compliance mechanism to ensure nations honoured promises.
It was more detailed on how poor countries should be financially aided to shore up their defences against rising seas, droughts, floods and storms.
Rich countries pledged 30 billion dollars in "fast-track" finance for the 2010-2012 period, including 11 billion from Japan, 10.6 billion from the European Union and 3.6 billion dollars from the United States.
They set an ambitious goal
deal "a major step forward." German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a leading proponent of strong action to confront global warming, gave the Copenhagen Accord only grudging acceptance, saying she had "mixed feelings' about the outcome and called it only a first step.
Outside the conference hall Saturday, more than 100 protesters chanted. "You're destroying our future!" Some carried signs of Obama with the words "climate shame" pasted on his face.
Obama had planned to spend only about nine hours in Copenhagen but. as an agreement appeared within reach, he extended his stay Friday by more than six hours to attend a scries of meetings. He and US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton held talks with European leaders, including Merkel. Britain's Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Obama said there was a "fundamental deadlock in perspectives" between big. industrially developed countries like the United States and poorer, though sometimes large, developing nations like China. India and Brazil. Still he said this week's efforts "will help us begin to meet our responsibilities to leave our children and grandchildren a cleanerplanet."
The deal reflects some progress helping poor nations cope with climate change and getting China to disclose its actions to address the warming problem.
But Obama agreed the world would have to take more aggressive steps to combat global warming. The first step, he said, is to build trust between developed and developing countries.
In a diatribe against the US, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez criticised the conference as undemocratic.
"There is a document that has been moving around, all sorts of documents that have been moving around, there is a real lack of transparency here," he said Friday. "We reject any document that Obama will slip under the door."
of "jointly mobilising" 100 billion dollars by 2020.
But to make the "fast-track" funds operational, the accord needed plenary approval
The outcome in Copenhagen will deliver a boost to Obama’s efforts to secure legislation in the US Congress that would set his country on a path to lower emissions by around 17 percent by 2020 over a 2005 benchmark.
He described the deal as a "meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough."
"Going forward, we are going to have to build on the momentum we have achieved here in Copenhagen. We have come a long way but we have much further to go," he added.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who will host the next climate summit in mid-2010, said she viewed the result "with mixed emotions" but added, "The only alternative to the agreement would have been a failure."
China had bristled at anything called "verification" of its plan to cut the intensity of its carbon emissions, seeing it as an infringement of sovereignty and saying rich nations bore primary responsibility' for global warming
Disagreements between the China and United States - -the world's top two carbon polluters -- had been at the core of the divisions.
Obama met twice with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao once privately and once with other leaders in hopes of sweeping aside some of the disputes that had blocked progress
The Copenhagen Accord was met with dismay by campaigners, who said it was weak, non-binding and sold out the poor.
"Well-meant but halfhearted pledges to protect our planet from dangerous climate change are simply not sufficient to address a crisis that calls for completely new ways of collaboration across rich and poor countries." said Kim Carstensen, leader of WWF's Global Climate Initiative.
Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International, called Copenhagen "an abject failure."
Kumi Naidoo, head of Greenpeace International, said the agreement contained so many loopholes "you could fly an airplane through it, .Airforce One, for example".
Since leaders failed to agree on a binding deal to reduce greenhouse gases, delegates also scrapped a plan to protect the world s biologically rich tropical forests early Saturday that would have paid some 40 poor, tropical countries to protect their forests.
Deforestation for logging, cattle grazing and crops has made Indonesia and Brazil the world's third- and fourth-biggest carbon emitters.
The overall outcome was a significant disappointment to those who had anticipated the deal brokered by Obama would be turned into a legally binding treaty. Instead, it envisions another year of negotiations and leaves myriad details yet to be decided.
"The deal is a triumph of spin over substance. It recognizes the need to keep warming below 2 degrees but does not commit to do so. It kicks back the big decisions on emissions cuts and fudges the issue of climate cash," said Jeremy Hobbs, executive director of Oxfam International.
Sudan's delegate, Lumumba Di-Aping, said the agreement would condemn Africa to widespread deaths from global warming and compared it to Nazis sending "6 million people into furnaces" in the Holocaust. The African Union, however, backed the deal and his statement was denounced by other delegations.
To resolve the stalemate early Saturday, UN officials changed the way the text was presented to the plenary. The conference recognised the agreement and those who agreed with it were invited to signit.
Robert Orr, the UN policy coordination chief, said the conference's decision to "take note" of the US-led accord provides it with "equal legal validity as 'accepted.'"
One reason it's been "a very wild roller coaster ride," he said, was the unusual negotiating process involving the hands-on participation of officials on multiple levels, ranging from heads of state to ministers to negotiators.
If the countries had waited to reach a full, binding agreement, "then we wouldn't make any progress," Obama said. In that case, he said, "there might be such frustration and cynicism that rather than taking one step forward, we ended up taking two steps back."
Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama called theFULL TEXT OF ACCORD ON PAGE 6