Sarkozy Urges China to Act on Climate Change

Sarkozy became the latest Western leader to urge Beijing to spell out goals for limiting emissions growth blamed for global warming.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy challenged China on Tuesday to play its part in averting climate catastrophe, winding up a state visit in which he repeatedly urged Beijing to shoulder its responsibilities as a global power.

Sarkozy became the latest Western leader to urge Beijing to spell out goals for limiting emissions growth blamed for global warming, something developing nations are not yet obliged to do.

"If we don't fix targets we won't succeed in avoiding catastrophe," he said in a speech to students at Beijing's Tsinghua University. "We can't have one response for Europe and one for Asia, one for the North and one for the South.

"We must absolutely find a way as industrialised, emerging and developing countries of working together to divide greenhouse emissions in half by 2050," he said, referring to a target adopted by the European Union.

He appealed to China's authorities to exert "immediate, profound and sustainable" influence on the way the world's fourth-largest economy produces goods and consumes energy.

But a commentary in Chinese state media said that, from the Industrial Revolution until the 1950s, the developed world was responsible for 95 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions and accounted for 77 percent of the world's total from 1950 to 2000.

"Therefore, on the problem of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, who should bear heavier responsibility goes without saying," it said.

Rapidly growing China is emerging as the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from factories, farms and vehicles blamed for climate change.

BALI TALKS

Next week in Bali, the United Nations launches what it hopes will be two years of talks to find a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, whose initial phase ends in 2012.

China says negotiations for a successor deal should focus on developed countries' responsibilities.

The United States, the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitter, has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which did not impose emissions reduction targets on developing countries. Australian Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd favours ratification.

Sarkozy said the problem needed a global effort, and it was anyway in China's interests to protect the health of its people.

Brandishing the results of a major consultation exercise on the environment launched in France after his election in May, Sarkozy said his country was ready to contribute a greater proportion of cuts than anything required from China.

But Europe would not indefinitely allow its producers to be penalised for the cost of cleaning up the environment without a mechanism to compensate for the carbon content of goods imported from cheaper production zones without similar standards.

INFORMAL BUT FRANK

Sarkozy's informal but frank remarks echoed earlier appeals to China to shoulder the responsibilities which go with its growing force in global politics, which marked the main theme of his first state visit to Asia since he was elected president.

He presided over some $30 billion in business deals, including a framework agreement to buy 160 planes from Airbus and a deal between China and French state-owned nuclear energy group Areva for two nuclear reactors and more than a decade of fuel.

Sarkozy's visit overlapped with the arrival of European monetary officials, who will follow talks on Tuesday with an EU-China summit on Wednesday, as Europe cranks up pressure on Beijing to correct what it sees as the unfair weakness of its yuan currency.

The French leader publicly told President Hu Jintao on Monday that China should act on the environment and currencies. But Premier Wen Jiabao reaffirmed Beijing's gradualist approach to yuan flexibility.

Sarkozy toured Beijing's preparations for the 2008 Olympics before heading to Shanghai for a whirlwind visit and then home.

He will return to a country reeling from a second night of clashes between youths and police in a poor Paris suburb and recovering from a crippling railway strike over his plan to end a system of special pension rights.