The Washington Post reports:

Negotiations on a new treaty to fight global warming will fail if rich nations are not treated as "culprits" and developing countries as "victims," China's top climate envoy said.

The whole world must take action to confront climate change, but developed countries have a "historical responsibility" to do much more because their unrestrained emissions in the past century are responsible for global warming, said Ambassador Yu Qingtai.

"The United States and the developed states as a whole are the countries that created the problem, caused the problem of climate change in the first place. In my view, that's what a culprit means," he said in an interview this week on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly debate on climate change.

The United States and China are the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

Washington has argued it should not have to cut its emissions to a level that would hurt the U.S. economy while countries like China and India are not required to make similar cuts.

Yu disputed that view, calling China "a victim" of climate change and stressing that its economy only started to grow in the last 25 years.

"It's not logical to ask China ... to cap its emissions or reduce its emissions in the same manner as a developed country is supposed to do," he said.

Yu said the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities" for developed and developing countries was accepted in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

To read more:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/16/AR2008021600407.html?wpisrc=newsletter