"The financial crisis must not be used to deter actions on climate change," Ban said Thursday in the western Polish city of Poznan, opening the high-level segment of a two-week climate conference.

"Managing the financial crisis requires massive global stimulus," he said, adding that a large part of that stimulus should be an "investment in a green future" that could "create millions of jobs and spur green growth."

"We need a green New Deal," Ban said.

Ironically enough, such a deal is being floated in the country that has hampered further progress on climate protection in recent years -- the United States.

President-elect Obama said he plans to raise energy efficiency and spend $150 billion over the next decade to boost renewables in the United States, measures he hopes will create as many as 5 million green jobs.

Obama told Ban in a telephone conversation he would take climate protection very seriously, the secretary-general said.

"The whole world is watching how the new U.S. administration will deal with these climate-change issues," Ban said. "I am encouraged by the incoming administration's plan to put alternative energy, environmentalism and climate change at the very center of America's definition of national security, economic recovery and prosperity."

Virtually all delegations have similarly high hopes, from the largest to the smallest country.

"We are looking for the United States to step out of the dark ages of inaction and become a leading light on climate change," said Apisai Ielemia, the prime minister of Tuvalu, a small Pacific island-state facing extinction from rising seas.

Observers have been disgruntled over Washington's stance on climate protection for the past few years. Washington reluctantly signed but never ratified the Kyoto Protocol because of fear it would cripple the U.S. economy. At a 2007 summit in Bali, Indonesia, where the world drew up a two-year roadmap to find a successor to Kyoto, the U.S. delegation irritated almost everyone with its blocking strategy. At the time, one delegate infamously told the U.S. delegation to cooperate or "get out of the way."

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who arrived in Poznan Thursday, is not part of the official U.S. negotiations team, but observers here see him as representing the change the next administration is expected to bring.

Kerry, who will report back to Obama from the conference, said his talks in Poznan showed him expectations for Obama are high, but he was confident the president-elect would not shy away from leadership.

"The United States is determined to lead not just rhetorically, but by example and policies," Kerry told a group of reporters.

U.S. leadership is needed as Europe is slowly watering down its own climate-protection targets because of the financial crisis, critics say. EU member states are currently discussing their ambitious targets at a summit in Brussels, with the exact look of how the bloc wants to reach its goals unclear.

Coal-dependent economies in Eastern Europe and energy-heavy industry nations such as Germany and Italy have warned that the effects of the crisis may leave no extra cash for climate protection.

Poland's electricity production is 95 percent coal-based, and the host of the Poznan conference is among the countries arguing that EU emissions-reduction targets are too ambitious.

Having economic growth and emissions reductions at the same time is possible, but "only in a country so developed as Denmark, for example," said Polish President Lech Kaczynski. "In less developed economies, the situation is more complex."

Kerry, however, seems to disagree, arguing that "people expressing pessimism now simply don't understand the economic possibilities" linked to green investments.

He said Obama's proposed spending on renewables, clean transport, sustainable construction and energy efficiency will make the U.S. economy more sustainable and create jobs in the process.

Germany, for example, invested in renewables as early as the 1980s and 1990s; today the nation is a leader in wind and solar energy. An estimated 250,000 people work in Germany's renewable energy sector, with the entire environmental industry employing roughly 1.5 million people.

Yvo de Boer, the United Nations' top climate official, admitted the world has changed since Bali and is now experiencing an economic downturn.

"But that doesn't mean that climate change will slow down," he said Thursday. "And when the world has recovered from the economic recession, it will not have recovered from climate change."

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