Industry curbs seen possible extra in climate deal

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

PARIS (Reuters) - Greenhouse gas curbs on industries such as steel and cement could help a U.N.-led drive to fight global warming despite fears they would be hard to implement, delegates at a U.S.-led conference said on Wednesday.

Developing nations objected at the 17-nation talks that such sectoral industrial schemes might throttle their inefficient energy-intensive businesses and said the burden for curbs should fall instead on rich nations.

But many said that such sectoral industrial targets, championed by Japan as a possible element of a planned new U.N. climate treaty beyond 2012, could be help alongside national targets for slowing climate change.

"The sectoral approach, we all agree, is not a substitute for economy-wide targets for greenhouse gases," Brice Lalonde, France's climate change ambassador, told reporters after Wednesday's talks among 17 nations. "It's complementary."

Seventeen nations, the European Commission and the United Nations meet in Paris on Thursday and Friday for a third round of a U.S.-led series of meetings to work out ways to fight global warming.

Experts were at a preliminary workshop on Wednesday on setting global industrial benchmarks for sectors of industry, such as for the amount of greenhouse gases produced by manufacturing a tonne of aluminium, steel or cement.

The Paris talks are partly trying to silence criticism that President George W. Bush is doing too little to fight climate change compared to other industrial allies who have agreed to cut emissions by at least 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12 under the Kyoto Protocol.

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