China may become the world's largest emitter of heat-trapping carbon dioxide this year or the next, said the International Energy Agency. The statement moves the timeline for China to take over the top spot from the US up by two years, the Financial Times reported. The announcement was made as talks begin to extend the Kyoto Protocol on global warming beyond 2012 but, in an unpublished Chinese government report quoted by Reuters, Beijing rejects binding caps on carbon emissions, opting instead to brake emissions growth. Meanwhile the US, which pulled out of Kyoto in 2001, has said it would not join any climate change regime that does not also apply to China and India as well as the rest of the developing world. Data from 2003 put the US as the top emitter of carbon dioxide with 23% of total world emissions. China comes in second with 16.5%. Still, the US was by far the bigger emitter on a per capita basis, at 20 tons, compared to 3.2 tons in China, and an average of 3.7 tons in the rest of the world.
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