Carbon plan still leaves US short of UN pledge: study

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President Barack Obama's plan to cut the carbon emissions of US power plants by up to 30 percent will leave America far short of its current pledges at UN climate talks, a study said Wednesday.
      
The United States promised in 2010 to reduce greenhouse gases by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels.
      
It has also set a 2050 target to further curb emissions by 83 percent compared to the 2005 benchmark.
      
However, specialists in Germany said in an analysis coinciding with a new round of UN climate negotiations in Bonn that Obama's plan would only reduce 2030 US national emissions to about 10 percent below 2005 levels.
      
"While the proposal is welcome, it is insufficient to meet the US's pledges of 17 percent reduction of all greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and is inconsistent with its long-term target of 83 percent below 2005 level by 2050," said Niklas Hoehne of Ecofys, a German group that helped analyse the plan's impact.
     
The review, called the Climate Action Tracker, is updated regularly to measure whether national pledges at the long-troubled UN talks are closing in on the goal of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
      
It warned on Wednesday that the world "is still tracking" towards 3.0-4.6 C warming by 2100, a scenario that many scientists said could be disastrous.
      
Obama's proposal, called the Clean Power Plan, seeks to curb national emissions from electricity plants by a national average of 30 percent by 2030, again compared to 2005 levels.
      
Power plants account for about 40 percent of carbon emission by the United States, the biggest greenhouse-gas polluter after China.
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