Obama's A-team flies into Copenhagen with promise to play hard ball

The White House's top negotiating team landed in the Danish capital today, pledging that they were seeking "robust engagement" with the countries gathered at the Copenhagen Summit.

The group of three cabinet secretaries and lead climate negotiator Todd Stern told reporters that the US was committed to tackling the "rapid approach of climate change" and would pay to help poorer nations combat global warming.

But they also implied that the main onus for delivering a successful deal rested with the large emerging economies and insisted that the US would not transfer climate funds to its main economic rival, China.

"I don't envision public funds, certainly not from the US, going to China," he said, arguing that industrialised nations should direct public money to the poorest countries. "We don't think China would be a first candidate."

He also insisted that the US would pay money into an international fund to aid climate adaptation and the rollout of clean technologies, but would not be guilt tripped into paying "reparations".

"We absolutely recognise our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere, up there, but the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations, I just categorically reject that," he said.

Yu Qingtai, China's climate change ambassador, told reporters that China did not see itself as "the first candidate of financial support", and was pushing for increased climate funding for developing nations in an attempt to " safeguard the basic principles" of the Kyoto Protocol.

China and other developing nations have spent much of the first three days of the summit criticising the US pledge to cut emissions 17 per cent on 2005 levels by 2020, arguing that this equates to only a small reduction on 1990 emissions and is well short of what is recommended by climate scientists.

However, Stern countered by laying the blame for the slow pace of the negotiations on those emerging economies that are resisting proposals for them to commit to binding actions on climate change.

"The core part of this negotiation is significant action by the major developing countries, there's no question," he said.

The "robust" US stance puts it on direct collision course with both emerging economies, who are insisting it sign up to more demanding emission targets, and poorer nations who today called for the negotiations to adopt a more ambitious target of limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.