GREEN POWER: Mr Al Gore and IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri posing with their awards after the Nobel Peace Prize 2007 ceremony in Oslo yesterday. -- PHOTO: REUTERS

The United States, China, Australia and Japan yesterday insisted that a draft document that will feed into a post-Bali declaration must delete binding targets.

UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said the targets were a critical part of the discussions.

'The scientific community has indicated that industrialised countries need to reduce emissions by that order if we are to come to grips on that issue,' he said. 'It is in the interest of everyone that we walk away from here with an idea of where this process should take us.'

Canada's Environment Minister John Baird said his country supports binding targets, but he too came under criticism for insisting that developing countries like China must also be subject to hard emissions caps.

'If you want to kill these negotiations, that's the way to do it,' Ms Jennifer Morgan, a spokesman for Climate Action Network, said of Canada's stance.

At the core of the draft is language that says industrial nations have to lower their carbon dioxide output by 25 to 40 per cent of 1990 levels by 2020, and that global emissions need to peak in the next 10 to 15 years and be slashed to half of 2000 levels by 2050.

Nobel Peace Prize winners - the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former US vice-president Al Gore - backed those targets. They collected their awards in Oslo, Norway, yesterday.

Mr Gore, in his acceptance speech, urged the United States and China - the world's two largest emitters of global warming gas carbon dioxide - to 'stop using the other's behaviour as an excuse for stalemate'.

He said he will ask leaders in Bali to impose carbon dioxide taxes and meet as often as every three months to work out a global treaty by 2010.

But US chief negotiator Harlon Watson said earlier that America opposes any figures in a Bali declaration.

Numbers 'prejudge negotiations', he said, going so far as to add that figures from the IPCC's analyses were not conclusive.

'Many uncertainties are surrounding that and, obviously, there's going to need to be a lot of analysis done over the course of the negotiations,' he said.

Greenpeace International campaigner Red Constantino called the proposed deletion of the target 'shameless'.

'It could not have happened at a worse time - the very day that the scientists received the Nobel Peace Prize, these governments have deleted the very reason they are getting recognised. Without these figures, the talks are meaningless,'' he said.

It was an ironic twist to a day that the UN's Mr de Boer had hailed as 'historic' in its recognition of the IPCC and its work.

Mr de Boer maintains that binding commitments would send a strong signal for investments that are being made now, and each week countries like China could be building even more conventional coal-fired power plants, he added.

'So every week that you don't make clear where you intend to go... is an investment decision that is going in the wrong direction,'' he said.

No doubt, yesterday's developments set the scene for more bickering to come as interested parties try to ensure the Bali declaration has some bite.

Pressure to do so will also come from forces beyond Bali's shores, said Mr Constantino.

'On the Global Day of Action on Climate Change on Sunday, tens of thousands participated,' he said.

'Those same numbers, multiplied many times, will condemn the governments here if they don't return meaning to these talks. The world is watching.'

arti@sph.com.sg