By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent HONOLULU, Jan 30 (Reuters) - The world's biggest emitters of global-warming greenhouse gases met behind closed doors on Thursday for a U.S.-sponsored conference as protesters pointed up Hawaii's vulnerability to climate change. The two-day meeting is meant to spur United Nations negotiations for an international climate agreement by 2009 so a pact will be ready when the carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, stressed that time was short to come up with a plan and said delegates to the Hawaii meeting need to take the lead. "It's important to bear in mind that the most vulnerable communities in the poorest countries, those who have contributed nothing to climate change, will be the worst affected by its impacts," de Boer told delegates before negotiations began. "I'm convinced it can be done, but only if all forces pull together and the major economies represented in this room have to take the lead among those forces." Around the table in a room cloaked by curtains that screened out the lush Hawaiian landscape were representatives of the richest countries -- the Group of Eight industrialized nations -- and some of the fastest-growing, including China and India. The United States has rejected the Kyoto Protocol, contending that its aim to set mandatory limits on carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants and vehicles unfairly exempts big emitters like India and China as well as developing countries such as Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico. The Bush administration favors what it calls "aspirational" goals to be set voluntarily by countries. In his final State of the Union address on Monday, President George W. Bush was applauded when he announced a $2 billion fund to ease the transfer of environmental technology. Even before the Hawaii climate conference formally began, environmental protesters stood in a downpour outside a delegates' reception bearing signs that read "People's Needs, Not Corporate Greed" and "The World Is Watching." Several dozen activists demonstrated a plan to draw a blue line near the meeting site indicating how high the ocean water would extend if there is a 39-inch (one meter) rise in global sea levels, which some experts predict by century's end. A column in the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper sounded a skeptical note. "If the U.S. finally drops its blinders and agrees to dramatic cuts in its greenhouse gas emissions, this meeting could be a defining moment in history. Or this meeting could be another nonevent, or worse, a cynical diversion," said the column, co-written by Jeff Mikulina, director of the Sierra Club's Hawaii chapter. (Editing by Chris Wilson)
Brazil's Environment Minister Marina Silva (R) beside Justice Minister Tarso Genro speaks about deforestation in Amazon rainforest during a news conference in Brasilia, January 30, 2008. REUTERS/Jamil Bittar (BRAZIL) ...
