John McCain vowed yesterday to put the US at the heart of international efforts to tackle global warming, proposing aggressive targets to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions and the creation of a cap-and-trade system to encourage investment in green technology. The Republican presidential candidate said climate change demanded "urgent attention" from the US, acknowledging the warnings of "credible scientists" that "time is short and the dangers are great". The remarks came in a policy speech designed to show the difference between Mr McCain's focus on global warming and President George W. Bush's reputation for foot-dragging on the issue. The McCain campaign has identified climate change as one of the policy areas it will use to differentiate the Arizona senator from Mr Bush and appeal to independent voters and moderate Democrats in November's election. Mr McCain called for a 60 per cent reduction in US carbon emissions from 1990 levels by 2050 - more aggressive than the Bush administration's target of halting emissions growth by 2025 but less ambitious than shorter-term targets set by European countries and proposed by Democrats in Congress. He said a cap-and-trade system, which allows companies to buy and sell carbon allowances, would unleash the power of the free market against climate change by creating incentives for companies to reduce emissions and invest in green technology. Climate change has combined with soaring petrol prices and concern about US dependence on foreign oil to make energy one of the hottest issues in the presidential campaign. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the Democratic hopefuls, also support the creation of a cap-and-trade system similar to the one adopted by the European Union. Some US lawmakers are already pushing legislation to set up a carbon trading market but the proposals face opposition from the Bush administration, which has long resisted mandatory caps on emissions. In an apparent swipe against the administration, Mr McCain said he would "not permit eight long years to pass without serious action on serious challenges" and promised US leadership to help the international community escape the "dead-end" diplomacy that hobbled the Kyoto treaty on climate change. But he echoed Mr Bush's view that China, India and developing countries must be part of any successor to the Kyoto protocols, which expire in 2012, and threatened trade sanctions against any country that sought economic advantage from lax environmental standards. "No country should be exempted from its obligations. And least of all should we make exceptions for the very countries that are accelerating carbon emissions while the rest of us seek to reduce emissions," he said. Mr McCain said it was in China's own interests to reduce emissions and promised to make US technology available to help it do so. "For all of its historical disregard of environmental standards, it cannot have escaped the attention of the Chinese regime that China's skies are dangerously polluted, its beautiful rivers are dying, its grasslands vanishing, its coastlines receding and its own glaciers melting," he said. Nick Berning, for Friends of the Earth, the environmental group, said Mr McCain's emissions targets were not aggressive enough to stop global warming and claimed his Senate voting record on green issues failed to match his rhetoric. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008