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Pachauri Urges Obama to Bring Bill for Cutting Emissions

The head of the UN Climate Change Panel Rajendra Pachauri has said that US President Barack Obama should do more to make sure that Congress approves a greenhouse emission bill in order to give global climate talks a big boost.

Pachauri, whose panel shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore, said that a legislation in the regard would clarify US emission targets making all the difference to a climate conference scheduled to be held in Copenhagen in December.

“I personally feel that he ought to be doing a lot more,” Pachauri told reporters on the sidelines of a conference.

He was answering a query about Obama’s commitment to combating climate change.

“I think that President Obama really needs to assert himself to see that the US passes legislation – it will make all the difference to negotiations,” he said, referring to the Copenhagen talks on Dec 7-18.

Ahead of Copenhagen Conference, pressure is mounting for officials belonging to 190 countries to give consent to a UN climate pact replacing the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012.

It may be mentioned that the EU countries had already agreed to slash down their greenhouse emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, but the US has still pass an identical legislation on its emission targets.

While the House of Representatives has approved a 2020 target to cut emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels, Congress as a whole has not approved any legislation, and analysts doubt that Obama will sign a bill by December.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said earlier this month that he was very worried time was running out before the Copenhagen conference.

The EU has pressured the United States to do more to secure a deal, and senior officials from the bloc will meet Obama in Washington early next month to discuss climate change, among other issues.

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