US joins clean technology partnership

The US, Australia and four Asian countries including China and India have agreed to create a partnership to deploy cleaner energy technologies in an attempt to curtail the growth of climate-changing pollution.

The agreement does not bind the countries - the others are Japan and South Korea - to specific emission reductions and is not viewed as a replacement for the Kyoto climate protocol, to which several of the participants have signed.

One of President George Bush's early acts as president was to rescind US acceptance.

The arrangement was viewed by senior White House officials as a significant step towards establishing a framework in which rapidly emerging industrial countries will be helped to produce cleaner energy and blunt the growth of climate-changing emissions, especially carbon from burning fossil fuels.

In a statement, President Bush called the deal a "results-oriented partnership" that will allow development and faster deployment of cleaner and more efficient energy technology. Its result, he said, will deal with pollution reduction, energy security and climate change "in ways that reduce poverty and promote economic development".

He said secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and energy secretary Samuel Bodman will meet their counterparts in the partnership this autumn to move the effort forward.

"We are hopeful this will create a complementary framework (to Kyoto)," said James Connaughton, chairman of the president's Council on Environmental Quality.

The Kyoto pact mandates greenhouse gas emission reductions only among industrial countries, a crucial reason Bush pulled the US out. The pact deals with climate change through voluntary action and by emphasising the need to develop new technologies that reduce emissions and capture carbon.

The agreement is expected, as it develops, to use technology transfers and exchange of ideas to "harness in significant and greater ways the investments necessary to ... reducing greenhouse gases," Connaugton said.

The six countries pledged "enhanced co-operation" to deal with the growth of climate-changing pollution while still meeting their growing energy needs.

Participants plan non-binding commitments to develop clean coal, nuclear and hydroelectric technologies that are less carbon intensive.

The US has been eager to find ways to get China, India and other rapidly industrialising nations to deal with climate change.

White House officials say that one problem with the Kyoto pact is that it does not require China and India, whose growing energy needs also will mean growing greenhouse pollution, to commit to emission reductions.

The US accounts for one-quarter of the world's greenhouse gases that are going into the atmosphere. Its emissions are growing at the rate of 1.5% a year despite the administration's voluntary climate change policies.

Emissions from developing countries are expected to grow even faster.

"Within the next decade or two, developing countries will overtake the industrial world in total greenhouse gas emissions, so that by 2025 more than half of global annual emissions will be coming from developing countries," economist David Montgomery, a critic of the Kyoto accord, told a recent US Senate hearing.

Environmentalists have criticised Bush's voluntary approach to dealing with climate change. They said the new initiative was little more than what was already being pursued through various bilateral discussions.