Obama expects agreement at Copenhagen

Encouraged by India and China's decision to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, US President Barack Obama is hopeful that an agreement could be reached at the ongoing climate conference in Copenhagen.

This is the reason why Obama has changed his participating date at the Copenhagen Summit from December 9 to December 18, as he believes that his negotiations might require a last minute push by world leaders, said Robert Gibbs, White House Press Secretary.

"Based on developments, primarily with the Chinese and the Indians, I think everybody agrees that we are in a better position -- I mean, 'we,' globally -- to get some sort of agreement out of Copenhagen," Gibbs said at a briefing here yesterday.

"The President believed, having helped to work both in enunciating our commitments, as well as ensuring that the Indians and the Chinese talked about their commitments, that we could move that to the end of the conference when some agreement is likely to need some help from world leaders," Gibbs told reporters.

"We announced the trip prior to Oslo, believing that talks in Copenhagen would be good for the President to go and give some momentum to those talks at the beginning of the period in Copenhagen," he said.