A 190-nation climate meeting in Bali began a hunt for a new global deal to fight global warming by 2009 on Tuesday with skirmishing about how far China and India should curb surging greenhouse gas emissions.

“The conference got off to an encouraging start,” said Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat of the December 3-14 meeting of 10,000 participants that will try to launch talks on a climate pact to succeed the UN’s Kyoto Protocol. After an opening day dominated by ceremony, governments set up a “special group” to look at options for launching two years of talks meant to bind the US and developing nations led by China and India into fighting climate change.

De Boer said the group of senior officials would report back to 130 environment ministers who will arrive next week at the talks in a luxury Indonesian beach resort.

The meeting also agreed to study ways to do more to transfer clean technologies, such as solar panels or wind turbines, to developing nations.

The Kyoto Protocol now binds 36 rich nations to curb emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels, by 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-12 in a step to curb droughts, floods, heatwaves and rising seas.
There was controversy about how to share out the burden. Environmentalists accused Kyoto nations Japan and Canada of asking China and India to do too much.

China and India say that rich nations must take on far deeper cuts in emissions and that they cannot take on caps yet because they need to burn more fossil fuels to end poverty.

“Canada and Japan are saying nothing about legally binding emission reductions for themselves after 2012,” said Steven Guilbeault of environmental group Equiterre. “They are trying to shift the burden to China and India.