US won't speed up emissions cuts: top climate negotiator

Well then, get ready for the protests.

From the article:

Domestic politics will not allow the United States to deepen it commitment for cutting carbon pollution over the next decade despite growing international pressure, Washington's top climate negotiator said Sunday.

"We are jumping as high as the political system will tolerate," Todd Stern said, rejecting China's call this week for rich nations to slash greenhouse gases by 40 percent before 2020, compared to 1990 levels.

"The 40 percent the Chinese have talked about is not realistic," the US Special Envoy for Climate Change told AFP on the eve of a two-day climate meeting of ministers from the world's most powerful economies.

A summit of Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF) members -- which together account for 80 percent of global CO2 emissions -- is scheduled for July in Italy, probably on the heels of a G8 summit there, Stern said.

US President Barack Obama proposes to cut US emissions by about six percent by 2020, and by at least 80 percent before mid-century.

Climate legislation wending its way through US Congress would meet both these goals, and perhaps more, if unchanged.

But in the run up to UN talks in Copenhagen in December charged with delivering a new global climate deal, developing countries such as China and India have said that this is not enough.

Their position has been echoed by many climate experts as well as the European Union, which has committed to a 20 percent reduction by 2020, 30 percent of others follow suit.

"It is clear that the United States is going to have to do more," France's environment minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, told journalists ahead of the MEF meeting.

Stern, however, cautioned that pushing for deeper cuts in the United States could backfire.

"We completely agree it is vital that developed countries get a path that is ambitious and consistent with what science is telling us to do," he told AFP in an interview.

"But perfect is the enemy of good -- you can insist on that, say you really need to have it, and you can end up with nothing."
___
And don't you love this line: Perfect is the enemy of good... what bull. It isn't about being "perfect" it is about being RESPONSIBLE. And really, where is the GOOD in these pathetic cuts? Proof positive once again that politics is not the place to look for real progress, and politicians have absolutely no idea what we are dealing with.

And what's this?

"US President Barack Obama proposes to cut US emissions by about six percent by 2020"...

SIX percent now? Really?