Gore blames US for blocking climate deal

Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore today blamed the US for blocking progress on a new international climate change agreement - …

Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore today blamed the US for blocking progress on a new international climate change agreement - but issued a rousing call for other countries to make history with a roadmap for a new emissions deal.

He urged delegates at the UN climate change conference in Bali to leave a "blank space" in their document for negotiations on a new treaty, to be filled by a new American administration in 2008.

Mr Gore - who won the Nobel Prize this year for his work on climate change - was speaking as the EU and US seemed at loggerheads over whether to include mention of emission cuts targets necessary for developed countries in the roadmap which will set the agenda for a deal to be agreed in 2009.

While criticising the US delegation for their failure in Bali , the former politician, who won an Oscar for his climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, indicated other countries should move forward without waiting for agreement on targets to be included in the roadmap.

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The former presidential candidate told them they could make great progress on getting a Bali mandate, as well as transferring green technology to developing countries, preventing deforestation, setting up a fund to allow poor nations to adapt to climate change and tackling poverty.

"I'm not an official of the US and not bound by diplomatic niceties, so I'm going to speak an inconvenient truth: My own country, the US, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali .

"But my country is not the only one which can take steps to ensure we move forward with progress and with hope," he told the audience at a side event at the Bali conference.

He told delegates they could be angry and frustrated with the US or they could do the hard work necessary and "save a blank space in your document" which could be filled at a later date by a more amenable president.

"Over the next two years, the US is going to be somewhere it's not now - you must accept that," he said.

And he called for a new deal to come into effect in 2010, not 2012 when the current Kyoto Protocol expires, because "we can't afford to wait another five years to replace the provisions of Kyoto".

In a speech littered with references to poets and leaders such as Winston Churchill and Gandhi, he told the audience: "We are one people on one planet, we have one future and one destiny and we must pursue it together.

"We ought to feel a sense of joy at having this important task in front of us. We have everything we need save, perhaps, political will and political will is a renewable resource."

Earlier Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, said he was concerned about the "pace of things".

The Bali talks are deadlocked over the terms for opening two years of talks on a global climate deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, a pact that binds most industrial nations to cut emissions of greenhouse gases until 2012.

"We are in an all-or-nothing situation in that if we don't manage to get the work done on the future [terms for negotiations] then the whole house of cards basically falls to pieces," Mr de Boer told a news conference.

Minister for the Environment John Gormley said yesterday rich countries that continue to prevaricate in confronting global warming were "guilty of a gross dereliction of duty and future generations will judge them harshly".

Addressing the first plenary session of the 13th UN Conference on Climate Change, he said everyone knew that the window of opportunity to prevent dangerous climate change is "rapidly closing" and there was an onus on the developed countries to show real leadership.