U.S. eyes deal on slashing clean technology tariffs

By Lindsay Beck

BEIJING (Reuters) - The United States hopes the world's major economies will agree to remove trade barriers on clean energy technologies when they meet alongside the Group of Eight rich nations next month, a senior official said on Friday.

James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said the World Bank had identified 43 technologies the United States and Europe proposed eliminating tariffs on.

"We think it is one of the most important and immediate signs of seriousness, because climate change is an urgent issue and we can see a very significant increase in the purchases of clean technologies if we eliminate the tariffs," Connaughton told reporters in Beijing.

Solar panels and wind turbines are among the clean technologies the World Bank identified.

At the July meeting, host Japan is expected to urge G8 nations to agree on a target of slashing greenhouse gases in half by 2050.

The world's major economies will also hold talks on climate change, aiming to push forward efforts to craft a framework by the end of 2009 to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

The U.N.-led talks in the Danish capital Copenhagen at the end of next year aim to agree on a successor to Kyoto that binds all nations to emissions curbs, depending on their circumstances.

The Kyoto pact, whose first phase expires at the end of 2012, binds only 37 industrialized nations to greenhouse gas cuts between 2008-12.