L’AQUILA, Italy — The world’s leading industrial nations have tentatively agreed on a plan to prevent global temperatures from rising above a fixed level, after a more far-reaching proposal to slash production of greenhouse gases fizzled, according to U.S. and European negotiators.
White House and European officials meeting for the Group of Eight summit said they would pledge to keep temperatures from rising more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above average levels of more than a century ago, before large-scale industrial pollution occurred.
Temperatures have already risen by nearly half that amount, leaving little wiggle room. It was unclear what mechanisms, if any, would be adopted to enforce the target.
Earlier, negotiators from 17 countries rejected a draft agreement to halve the global production of greenhouse gases by 2050. Under that plan, the United States, Japan and many European countries would have been required to cut gases even more, by 80 percent.
Although European negotiators and many environmental advocates favored that proposal, it failed to win approval from China and India, whose leaders have argued that they could still end up bearing an unfair proportion of the burden.
The White House said it supports the goal of slashing greenhouse gases in half by 2050, including the required 80 percent cuts for industrialized nations such as the United States.
Administration officials told reporters that the Group of Eight would probably endorse the plan on a nonbinding basis.
Environmental groups, however, said the endorsement would prove largely meaningless without support from China and India, whose production of greenhouse gases is soaring.
The Group of Eight consists of the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia.
Several developing nations, including China and India, have been invited to the summit. But they are not officially part of the exclusive club formed decades ago when Europe, Japan and the United States dominated the global economy.
Attempts to persuade China to agree to a climate-change deal were dealt a setback when President Hu Jintao abruptly flew back home to deal with ethnic violence in China’s western province of Xinjiang, which has resulted in at least 156 deaths.
Hu had been scheduled to meet with President Barack Obama in L’Aquila this morning.
Later today, Obama is scheduled to chair a meeting of the Major Economies Forum, a 17-nation group that accounts for nearly four-fifths of the world’s greenhouse-gas production.
Summit negotiators had hoped to win a stronger agreement on climate change to build momentum for a global treaty that will be discussed at a U.N. conference in Copenhagen in December.
