Asia-Pacific leaders meeting at the Sydney Opera House on Saturday were expected to endorse a declaration committing them to reducing greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, according to dpa. But the 21 leaders gathered for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Australia's biggest city have baulked at setting targets and may even delay promising any action on global warming until the Kyoto Protocol has run its course in 2012. US President George W Bush, Chinese Premier Hu Jintao, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Russian President Vladimir Putin and 17 other leaders are expected to agree that a "long-term aspiration global emissions-reduction goal" will be part of the post-Kyoto fix for slowing global warming. The UN-sponsored Kyoto Protocol was thrashed out in Japan in 1997 and commits 35 industrialized countries to legally binding emissions- reductions targets. Developing countries were to join at a later date. Bush and APEC host Australian Prime Minister John Howard opposed the binding targets and refused to ratify the protocol. They argued that meeting ambitious targets would hurt their economies and that it was wrong for only rich countries to bear the cost of addressing climate change. The US is the single biggest polluter and Australia, the world's biggest coal exporter, leads the emissions rankings on a per capita basis because of its almost exclusive reliance on coal for power generation. Environmental campaigner Abigail Jabines from international lobby group Greenpeace accused Bush and Howard of trying to wriggle out of their climate obligations by aspiring to nothing more than "aspirational goals" that are neither fixed nor legally binding.
