Nations Feud At Climate Talks, U.S. at Home

The first UN climate talks for the year entered their final phase on Friday in Bangkok with negotiators still trying to hammer out a deal after familiar feuds between rich and poor nations flared.

The four days of talks had an apparently modest main goal of sorting out an agenda for the rest of the year's negotiations that would lay the foundations for agreements at an annual UN climate summit in South Africa in November.

But delegates said the agenda had still not been decided by early Friday, with one key point of dispute an insistence by many poorer countries for a greater focus on actions developed countries must take to fight global warming.

"Everybody is a bit surprised, we did not expect the agenda to stall the talks for this long," France's ambassador for climate change negotiations, Serge Lepeltier, told AFP.

Delegates said a compromise could still be reached by the end of the talks on Friday evening that would set a path towards the end-of-year summit in Durban.

But they said the spirit of cooperation between developed and developing countries that led to breakthroughs at the last annual summit in the Mexican resort city of Cancun in December was not nearly as strong in Bangkok.

"This year will be more difficult and Durban will be more difficult than Cancun," Lepeltier said.

"The power struggle is back."

The talks began on Tuesday with poor nations demanding that rich ones agree to a second round of legally binding greenhouse gas emission reduction commitments under an updated Kyoto Protocol.

Developing countries, including China, did not have to commit to cutting emissions as part of the Kyoto Protocol and most of them maintain this should remain the case.

The first round of commitments are due to expire at the end of 2012, but some richer countries have said they do not want to sign up to a second phase because major polluters, the United States and China, will not.

The United States never ratified the Kyoto Protocol and its climate envoys have repeated this week that the country has no intention of signing on.

On Thursday the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill aimed at preventing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

The 255-172 vote in the Republican-held chamber came a day after the Democratic-led Senate rejected such a move, making it highly unlikely lawmakers will actually move to curb EPA's regulatory powers.

The US House of Representatives approved a cap-and-trade bill to fight climate change in 2009, but the Senate never approved such a measure.

Throughout the Bangkok talks, some of the richer countries have pushed to have the focus for this year's negotiations primarily on pushing forward the more modest agreements achieved in Cancun last year.

However poorer nations say that, if only the Cancun agreements are put into action by the end of 2012, rich nations will not have to agree on legally binding emission cuts and the Kyoto Protocol will have largely fizzled out.

The Cancun agreements saw all nations pledge "urgent action" to keep temperatures from rising no more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

A Green Climate Fund was also established that aims to by 2020 channel $100 billion annually from rich countries to poor ones to help them cope with climate change.

But many of the hardest issues were put aside in Cancun because nations were seeking to rebuild trust and revive UN climate negotiations, following a near collapse in the process 12 months earlier at a summit in Copenhagen.