Promises? Leaders must act to spur climate talks

By Jeff Mason - Analysis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - World leaders pledged last week to step up efforts to reach a U.N. deal to fight climate change, but they will have to match rhetoric with rapid action to break a crippling deadlock before a December deadline.

At a United Nations meeting on climate change in New York and a subsequent summit of G20 leaders in Pittsburgh, leaders from U.S. President Barack Obama to Chinese President Hu Jintao laid out measures to advance talks on global warming.

It was not enough.

With only two and a half months to go before 190 nations gather in Copenhagen to forge a successor to the emissions-capping pact known as the Kyoto Protocol, urgency for a breakthrough on key topics of disagreement is growing.

Progress on those outstanding roadblocks did not emerge from either meeting. Industrial and developing nations remain at odds over how to spread out greenhouse gas emission curbs.

Hu promised China would reduce its emissions compared to economic growth and Obama got G20 leaders to agree to phase out subsidies on oil and other fossil fuels, but the issue of climate finance -- aid from industrial countries to developing nations dealing with climate change -- went largely untouched.

"We will intensify our efforts, in cooperation with other parties, to reach agreement in Copenhagen," G20 leaders said in a final statement on Friday, directing finance ministers, again, to study climate finance issues and report back at their next meeting.

That has happened before.