LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's carbon dioxide emissions rose by 1.5 percent last year mainly because of an increase in pollution from industry and the transport sector, the government has said.

This is the second year running the country's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have risen and environmentalists said the UK was in danger of missing its Kyoto Protocol target for curbing greenhouse gas pollution.

"These figures will be a huge embarrassment to Tony Blair who has made climate change a priority for 2005 and has called for urgency in tackling the issue," environmental group Friends of the Earth said in a statement on Thursday.

The UK's legally binding Kyoto target is to reduce emissions of six greenhouse gases, of which CO2 is the main one, to 12.5 percent below 1990 levels by 2009-2012.

Britain was well within its target until recently thanks to the replacement in the early 1990s of polluting coal-fired power stations with cleaner gas plants.

According to Friends of the Earth, the latest projections show the UK's emissions for 2004 are just 12.6 percent below 1990 levels.

The government's figures, which are provisional, showed Britain churned out 158.5 million tonnes of carbon equivalent last year, up 1.5 percent on 2003.

Britain has a domestic goal of reducing its CO2 emission levels by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2010, and to curb CO2 pollution by 60 percent by 2050.

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