Not a climate treaty, but political deal possible

COPENHAGEN — There's not enough time to strike a detailed and binding deal at next month's Copenhagen conference on climate change but nations say it still can succeed if all 192 countries can agree on two sets of numbers.

Those numbers — how much money will be given to poor countries to adapt to global warming and how much industrial countries will reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the next 10 years — are highly contentious, and there's no guarantee that even the scaled-back ambition for a political agreement can be reached.

Cabinet ministers and top negotiators from 40 key countries convened Monday for two days of closed-door meetings to prepare for the U.N. conference in the Danish capital, but were unlikely to try to set those specific numbers. That will remain for the summit next month.

But other crunch issues required discussion, officials said. Key among them was how financing — more than $100 billion a year within a decade — will be raised and delivered to countries in need. Also critical was how major emerging economies like India and China can help fight climate change, and how their contributions can be embedded in an international accord.

President Barack Obama, in Beijing, put climate change on top of his agenda for talks with President Hu Jintao, looking to increase collaboration on green energy and joint research projects, but the two leaders were not expected to discuss specific targets to be set out at Copenhagen.

Obama and other leaders at an Asia Pacific summit last week affirmed the growing consensus that the December deadline set two years ago for a completed climate accord is out of reach, and reset the goal for Copenhagen as a political deal.

But that agreement would cover all the essential elements, leaving only the legal and technical details to be filled in later, Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen told Obama and the others on Sunday.

"We cannot do half a deal in Copenhagen and postpone the rest till later," he said in a speech released by his office Monday. "We need the commitments. We need the figures. We need the action," he said.

Loekke Rasmussen said he did not want Copenhagen to end with "a political declaration with niceties." Instead, the conference should deliver a precise text of five to eight pages laying out an agreement for financing, transferring clean-energy technology to developing countries and delivering fast-action money to help poor countries over the next three years until a new climate treaty comes into force.