Pacific Rim leaders adopt modest goals on warming

SYDNEY, Australia — Pacific Rim leaders agreed Saturday to curb global warming by improving energy use and expanding forests, laying out a plan they hope will influence future climate-change talks but that critics dismissed as too timid.

President Bush, Russian President Vladimir Putin, China's Hu Jintao and leaders of other Asia-Pacific economies adopted the program at an annual summit after officials struck a deal between richer and developing nations.

The program's centerpieces are two modest goals — one on energy efficiency, the other on forests. Unlike the contentious, U.N.-backed Kyoto Protocol, the program does not set targets on the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause global warming, and its goals are voluntary.

Yet in bringing together the disparate group of countries on a contentious issue, the program may carry weight in upcoming talks on a new post-Kyoto blueprint.

A massive demonstration that activist groups had called for mostly fizzled in the presence of a show of force by police and threats of arrest.