U.S. defends Bush at U.N. climate talks

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

POZNAN, Poland (Reuters) - The United States defended President George W. Bush's much-criticized climate policies on Monday at United Nations talks, where President-elect Barack Obama won praise for an "ambitious" change of course.

"You are quite right. We have had a lot of criticisms and I can show you some scars," chief U.S. negotiator Harlan Watson quipped at a news conference on the opening day of December 1-12 talks on a new climate treaty by 187 nations in Poland.

Bush has often been accused of doing too little to combat global warming and angered many U.S. allies in 2001 by failing to back the Kyoto Protocol, the U.N. plan under which all other industrialized nations aim to curb greenhouse gases until 2012.

But Watson said the United States under Bush had promoted new green technologies, fostered talks among major emitters including China and India, and worked to cut emissions of greenhouse gases linked to protecting the ozone layer.

Bush has denounced Kyoto as too costly and said it wrongly omitted 2012 goals for developed nations. The U.N. talks in Poland, of 10,700 delegates, are at step to work out a new, global treaty to succeed Kyoto by the end of 2009.

Obama won praise for planning cuts as part of a fight to avert heatwaves, droughts, more powerful cyclones and rising seas. Bush's domestic plans foresee a peak in U.S. emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, only in 2025.

"I am delighted to see that ... Obama is planning ambitious energy and climate policies as part of the solution to the economic slowdown," Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in a speech.

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