SAUDI ARABIA: November 16, 2007


RIYADH - OPEC oil exporters must take climate change seriously at their summit meeting this week, ahead of a key meeting to tackle global warming in Bali next month, a leading UN climate change official said on Thursday.


Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told an OPEC forum in the Saudi capital he hoped the exporter group's leaders would discuss proposals for funding research into reducing levels of carbon in the atmosphere.

"I encourage OPEC to contribute to climate change abatement and to play an important role in history to drive forward sound solutions to a global problem," he said.

"They should continue to take climate change seriously," he said, speaking of heads of state from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, who are due to meet in Riyadh on Saturday and Sunday.

"International action on climate change is a war against emissions, not a war against oil."

OPEC includes many of the world's top oil producers, whose economies are booming as energy prices soar to record levels.

De Boer told reporters one idea floated in forums ahead of the summit was for OPEC, industrial nations and developing countries to each stump up US$1 billion to research carbon dioxide capture and storage -- removing gases from the atmosphere.

"I'd be interested to see when the OPEC heads of state meet over the weekend, whether that's an idea that they pick up on," he said.


FIRST DOLLAR BILL

"If oil producing countries put first dollar bill on the table then, to my mind, that makes it impossible for rich oil consuming countries to then not put another one next to it."

He said OPEC was looking to new technologies to help curb greenhouse gas emissions from oil: "They have rightly continued to focus on the idea that it's about addressing climate change and not about stigmatising particular fuels."

De Boer said December's UN climate change conference in Bali, where negotiations on a new international climate change regime are to be launched, will be a make-or-break point for international efforts to stop the planet heating up.

"If things go wrong in Bali then we really are in deep trouble. If you get a wake-up call from science now and don't act on it, then that means you are in trouble," he said, describing climate change as the most complicated issue facing the international community.

"There are strong signals that countries are willing to advance negotiations in Bali and come to a negotiating agenda."

But the UN climate chief said a solution must not cripple the developing world's economies and that nuclear energy would be key to handling the problem.

"I really feel we have to accept economic growth and the desire to eradicate poverty as a reality," he said.

"I have not seen a credible scenario to reverse climate change that doesn't involve nuclear," he said, citing the future energy needs of China and India, which each have populations of over one billion.

(Additional reporting by Alister Doyle, editing by Anthony Barker)


Story by Andrew Hammond


REUTERS NEWS SERVICE