By Shankar Sharma

A comparison with the environmental disaster that is facing China is worth making.

The British government sold 4 million permits in the country's first auction of European Union carbon emissions allowances but held that revenues would not necessarily be used to fight climate change.

The permits, called EU Allowances (EUAs), were sold on Wednesday to industry at 16.15 euros a tonne, raising 64.6 million euros ($81.55 million) for the British Treasury.

The British government will take hefty revenues from its first carbon emissions permit auction on Wednesday rather than earmark the money for consumers or the climate it aims to protect, analysts and lobby groups said.

Europe's first auction of carbon dioxide permits took place yesterday, with the UK government reaping about

Rainforest nations will lobby the United Nations to set up a single body to coordinate the use of carbon credit trading to stop deforestation at a conference next month in Poland, an official from the countries said on Tuesday.

Barack Obama said on Tuesday the United States would "engage vigorously" in climate change talks when he is president and pledged, despite the financial crisis, to stick to plans to reduce emissions sharply by 2020.

THE Scandinavians say they're already green; the eastern Europeans say they're too poor; the Belgians say they're too small; the French say they're too nuclear; and so on. As Europe negotiates the final details of its new plan to tackle climate change, which will be published on January 23rd, arguments are raging over how the burden should be distributed.

Elisabeth Rosenthal
Emissions from industrialised countries plateaued in 2006 after six years of growth, the United Nations said on Monday. But the countries have not yet reported emissions from the past two years, and the new report did not include large emerging economies like those of India and China.

Economic revival in the former Soviet bloc has been the main driver in pushing up industrialised nations' greenhouse gas emissions since 2000, despite plans to cut them, UN data showed on Monday.