Benn Calls on Us to Adopt Binding Aims on Emissions

The environment secretary, Hilary Benn, yesterday called on the US to agree to mandatory goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, warning that the alternative was dangerous climate change.

Mr Benn made his appeal at a climate change summit at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The summit, attended by more than 80 heads of state and government, was intended to bolster international resolve to come to an agreement in principle on a new international global warming pact in December in Bali.

President George Bush was not at the meeting, but was due to attend a post-summit dinner last night. He has called his own conference of "major emitters" for Thursday this week, at which he is expected to promote his preference for a looser global accord in which nations set their own non-mandatory targets.

Mr Benn said that approach would not work. "The only way forward must involve developed countries taking on binding emissions commitments because a voluntary approach ... isn't going to do the job," he said. "And that means all of us, including the largest economy in the world, the United States - taking on binding reduction targets. It is inconceivable that dangerous climate change can be avoided without this happening."

The UK is sending only a junior minister, Phil Woolas, to the Washington meeting, but Mr Benn denied that represented a snub. "I welcome the fact that the United States is now engaged in the debate about climate change in a way it was not in the past," the environment secretary said.

A British official said there was a sense that the debate in the US was shifting towards taking climate change more seriously, and it would be counter-productive to criticize Washington for not going far enough. He thought that the Bush administration's attempt to take over the global climate change agenda to push it towards a non-mandatory agreement to replace the Kyoto accord was running out of steam. British officials do not believe the Bush administration will do a U-turn in Bali, but point out that when a new climate change agreement is laid down in detail and signed, in Copenhagen in 2009, Mr Bush will no longer be in office.