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Unveiling its first climate-action plan, China pledged greater energy efficiency and offered robust targets for developing solar, wind and other renewable energy sources.
"We are ready to work with the rest of the international community to reduce the effects of global warming," Ma Kai, the minister in charge of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission, said after issuing the climate-change report.
While pledging to slow the relentless growth of greenhouse-gas emissions - blamed for global warming and rising seas - Ma rejected mandatory caps on those emissions.
He said it would be "neither realistic nor fair" to make China and other nations sacrifice economic growth and postpone modernization to fight global warming when it was an "indisputable fact" that well-off nations had produced 75 percent of the carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels from 1950 to 2002.
He said total emissions of greenhouse gases from China might overtake those of the United States as early as 2009 but that China hadn't been polluting long and its 1.3 billion people emitted pollutants at barely a third of the levels per capita of developed countries.
The release of the report seemed designed to counter criticism as President Hu Jintao heads to Germany to attend an expanded meeting this week of Group of Eight leading industrial countries.
China's economy has grown at an astounding double-digit pace for more than two decades but at great cost to the environment. Air-choking coal provides nearly 70 percent of China's energy needs, and many of its rivers are toxic.
Ma said China had contributed to the fight against global warming on a number of fronts, including its sharp limitations on population growth.
Ma also said China would expand its forests from around 18 percent of its land today to 20 percent by 2010 to help absorb carbon dioxide from the air.
China also will reduce the energy needed for its economic production by 20 percent by the end of the decade and will forge ahead with a plan to have hydropower, wind farms and biomass energy supply 16 percent of energy needs by 2020.
Bush proposed last week that the 15 biggest emitters of greenhouse gases hold meetings and set an emissions goal, but each country would be able to decide individually how to implement it.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol is an international treaty that caps the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted from power plants and factories in industrialized countries. It exempts developing countries like China and India, which is one of the reasons the U.S. and Australia refused to sign on.
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