Obama climate goals “not enough”

Chinese and Indian delegates to the United Nations-led climate talks in Poznan, Poland, have said that US president-elect Barack Obama's goal to cut greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2020 is inadequate to fight global warming, Reuters reported. However, both nations said that Obama's target is an improvement from president George W Bush's lax policies on climate change.
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"It’s more ambitious than president Bush but it is not enough to achieve the urgent, long-term goal of greenhouse gas reductions," Tsinghua University’s He Jiankun, of the Chinese delegation, said at the talks.
 

Dinesh Patnaik, a director at the Indian Foreign Ministry echoed, "It’s not ambitious enough considering the Kyoto Protocol targets, but given the eight-year Bush administration it’s progress".

The United States’ emissions are currently about 14% above 1990 levels. President Bush’s plans had predicted emissions continuing to rise and peaking in 2025. The US is one of the few industrialised nations that did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which obliges 37 developed nations to curb emissions by 2012 in an effort to prevent some of the more serious side-effects of global warming.

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