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The European Commission will push members of the Group of Eight industrialized countries to equal the European Union's commitment to fighting global warming when the G8 summit opens in July in the hot-spring resort of Toyako, Hokkaido, a senior EC official said. Joao Vale de Almeida Claiming the EU has set an ambitious goal on climate change, Joao Vale de Almeida, a G8 summit "sherpa," or personal representative of the EC president, said he will call on other members to take their share of responsibility.

Russia's opposition to new cuts in greenhouse gases means all of the world's top four emitters are against making quick reductions, complicating plans for a new UN climate treaty by the end of 2009. "The positions ... are just the tip of the iceberg of the problems ahead," said Bill Hare, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. The United States, China, Russia and India are the top emitters.

Russia will not accept binding caps on its greenhouse gas emissions under a new climate regime, currently being negotiated to succeed the Kyoto Protocol after 2012, top officials said on Monday. Kyoto puts a cap on the average, annual greenhouse gas emissions from 2008-12 for some 37 industrialised countries, including Russia. But former communist countries are well within their emissions targets, which are compared to 1990 levels, because their industries and carbon emissions subsequently collapsed after they struggled to adapt to free markets.

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda focused on a new global climate change initiative and a decades-old dispute over a group of Pacific islands when he met Russia's two leaders on Saturday. Japanese officials had said Fukuda would urge Russia to accelerate talks aimed at resolving the territorial row over the islands, a running sore in relations that has prevented the two states from signing a peace treaty ending World War Two.

As much as 40 per cent of the world's energy is directly used in buildings, and if the indirect consumption is added