(RTTNews) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday she would attend the crucial United Nations climate-change summit in the Danish capital of Copenhagen, scheduled for December 7-18, to present a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012, if the U.S., China and India revealed their negotiating positions.

In a speech to the German parliament outlining her new ministry's agenda, she called upon the trio to make substantive pledges of action against global-warming to prevent the failure of next month's climate summit.

"A substantial political agreement is indispensable to create conditions for a binding international protocol for post- 2013. Time is pressing," she said in her first policy speech of her second term.

Merkel said the European Union (E.U.) had put forward a clear and unambiguous position on handling climate-change, and now expected the USA and others, including China and India, to clearly spell out their respective positions.

Asserting that she would make a special personal effort to achieve this, Merkel said that if it was successful, she would go to Copenhagen.

Late last month, an E.U. summit felt that developing nations would need 100 billion euros (146 billion dollars) per year by 2020 to tackle climate-change, but leaders from the 27-nation bloc failed to nail down how much it would give.
Amid strong indications that the crunch summit will fall short of achieving a binding, historic pact, it is unclear whether other leaders, most notably U.S. President Barack Obama, will turn up.

Washington is reluctant to declare its stand even as a climate bill squeaked through the House of Representatives in June, but is stuck in Senate committees.

Warning that a failure of the Copenhagen summit would set back international climate policy by years, the German leader said the global community could not afford such a situation even as the United States and emerging powers, including China and India, debated over who needed to do more on climate-change.

"We would never allow the worldwide financial and economic crisis to be a cheap excuse for failing to protect the environment," she said, adding: "That is the biggest error we could make."

Merkel's speech came a week after she addressed the U.S. Congress during which she placed special emphasis on the need for a climate-change accord, and said that "we have no time to lose."

Global leaders at the Copenhagen summit would be trying to hammer out an accord for 2013 onwards that will include emission cuts and financial and technological aid to help poorer countries develop low-carbon economies and deal with the ravages of climate-change.

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