The economy does not have to be weakened if there is a serious effort to use existing clean energy and energy conservation technologies, former US president Bill Clinton told the UN climate change conference in Montreal Friday.

Clinton was invited to the final day of the Nov. 28-Dec. 9 UN summit at the invitation of the Sierra Club of Canada. He said if clean energy technologies are used, the Kyoto targets could be met and surpassed without economic harm.

"There's no longer any serious doubt that climate change is real,accelerating and caused by human activities. We are uncertain about how deep and time of arrival of the consequences, but we are quite clear that they will not be good," said Clinton.

He put down the main US fear about Kyoto -- that it would hurt the economy by chaining it to greenhouse gas reductions that were not achievable.

That claim, he said, "was flat wrong."

"...If we had a serious disciplined effort to apply on a large- scale, existing clean energy and energy conservation technologies - -we could meet and surpass the Kyoto targets easily in a way that would strengthen, not weaken, our economy," said Clinton to applause from the delegates.

Although the US is not one of the 157 countries that have signed onto the Kyoto accord, environmentalists were hopeful that it would sign a separate agreement for all nations.

Canada is hoping nations, not just ones under Kyoto, would sign a deal to hold open-ended talks about a long-term strategy to fight climate change.

But environmentalists indicated they were losing hope that the US would sign on -- which would seriously dampen efforts to develop a strategy to fight global warming past 2012, when the first Kyoto Protocol commitment ends.

As president, Clinton championed the Kyoto Protocol, which sets out limits by which industrialized countries must reduce greenhouse gas emissions and five other gases below 1990 levels by 2012.

US President George Bush never backed the plan, saying it would harm the economy. More recently, the US has rejected suggestions it rejoin future negotiations to set emission controls for the period after 2012, when the Kyoto framework expires.

The US accounts for about a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, and some have argued that the Kyoto Protocol cannot work without its participation.

This is the first annual UN climate conference to be held since the Kyoto Protocol took effect in February. The two-week conference was attended by delegates from more than 180 countries.

Source: Xinhua