Progress made in knife-edge climate negotiations

THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- Some progress has been made at a United Nations climate conference after an all night session on global warming -- but delegates warned the talks could still falter.

"The crunch issues are largely resolved, but not everything," the UK Environment Minister Michael Meacher said, adding that most of the basic elements of an agreement now appeared to be in place.

Delegates said there had been some successful horse-trading overnight that closed the gap between the main protagonists -- the United States and the 15-nation European Union -- who have argued over ways to clean up the earth's atmosphere.

"The broad outline of what is being discussed is an agreement that gives the U.S. some major concessions, but at the same time not the giant loopholes that it was seeking at the beginning," said Phil Clapp of the U.S. National Environmental Trust, a green lobbying group.

"It looks like an agreement that could significantly improve the prospect for ratification by the U.S. Senate," he said.

Poor nations and green groups warned of environmental catastrophe if the talks among 180 countries in The Hague failed to forge the first concrete global steps against climate change by a 1600 GMT deadline on Saturday.

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"We're trying, we're trying, that's all I can say," said top U.S. negotiator Frank Loy.

Some delegates said the talks were on a knife-edge and could fail because of widespread opposition to what they see as U.S. reluctance to limits its own power to pollute.

Swedish Environment Minister Kjell Larsson said: "I think it's close to collapse and I think we should wait for a final assessment."

Earlier it had looked as if the talks would fall far short of agreement on a document setting the guidelines on how nations may reach targets they accepted three years ago for reducing emissions of the greenhouse gases.

The gases are blamed for the abnormal warming of the Earth and bizarre weather changes.

Conference chairman Jan Pronk had submitted a compromise proposal on Thursday meant to bridge the differences between the U.S. and the EU, but both sides rejected it as inadequate.

"The United States is deeply disappointed" with Pronk's proposal, said chief U.S. negotiator Frank Loy, calling it "unacceptably imbalanced."

Speaking for the Europeans, French Environment Minister Dominique Voynet called the proposal "a step backward" and said it was riddled with loopholes that might allow emissions to increase, not decrease.

The paper was also denounced by dozens of environmental lobby groups who said it would give countries too much leeway to wriggle out of emissions-reduction targets they committed to in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, worldwide emissions of heat-trapping gases must decline to 5.2 percent below their 1990 levels by 2012.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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