Australia blamed China and India for its refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change despite a major new report warning of impending catastrophe, AFP reported. Australia and the US are the only two countries that have not ratified the agreement, which imposes targets for reducing emissions of the greenhouse gases. In defiance of renewed parliamentary pressure to ratify the protocol, Prime Minister John Howard said China and India were major polluters who would not be curbed by Kyoto. "The reason we will not sign Kyoto in its present form is that it does not comprehensively embrace all of the world's major emitters," he said, singling out the two Asian giants. The debate came after former World Bank chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern said the economic fallout of climate change could be on the scale of the two world wars and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Inaction could cost the equivalent of 5-20% of global gross domestic product every year, Stern estimated.
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