A fair bit of the doubt and confusion surrounding next month's UN climate summit has suddenly cleared, with the world's two biggest greenhouse gas emitters - the US and China - announcing pledges on curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

As is set out in the Bali Action Plan - the agreement made at the UN summit two years ago - the US pledge takes the form of an actual cut in emissions.

China - whose per-capita emissions are far lower - vows to reduce carbon intensity, the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of GDP, by 40-45% from 2005 levels by 2020.

This is ambitious - more ambitious than many observers had expected.

But it doesn't mean China's emissions will fall - in fact they are still likely to rise, with the rate at which economic growth rises outstripping the rate at which carbon intensity falls.

In fact, the target could be met in a number of ways.

One would be to use all energy more efficiently. Another would be to increase the proportion of energy deriving from low-carbon sources such as wind turbines and nuclear reactors.

A third would be to produce goods of higher value without changing the nature of energy production and use, raising GDP while leaving emissions unchanged.

In practice, the Chinese plan will probably include a mixture of those three elements. As my colleague Roger Harrabin reported from his recent trip to China, energy efficiency is being targeted - certainly in new developments - while investment in renewables is forging ahead.

The possibility had been raised - not least on this blog - that the recent bilateral talks between Presidents Barack Obama and Hu Jintao might prove crucial in allowing these pledges to be put forward, because the politics of the two countries on climate change are wrapped up in several important ways.

Firstly, as the two countries produce about two-fifths of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, they clearly hold the key more than any others to a deal that really will curb human-induced climate change; everyone else knows that these two governments have to be fully on board.

Secondly, as the world's largest historical emitter and one of the largest per-capita emitters, the US is the country that developing nations have most in their sights when they talk about the duty of the rich to lead.

Conversely, China is the country that US senators have most in their sights when they talk about the need for all major emitters to take action.

A related point is that at some point in the future, China will become the main US rival for the title of the world's biggest economy, which brings issues of competitiveness into the mix.

Although details of the talks that Mr Obama and Mr Hu had during the former's recent visit to Beijing remain under wraps, one logical conclusion would be that the two leaders were able to agree on a formulation that would be mutually acceptable - and that here, we are seeing the fruits of that agreement.

China now becomes the latest major developing nation after Indonesia, Brazil and South Korea to pledge a target; and as we approach within touching distance of the Copenhagen summit, virtually all of the major cards are on the table on curbing emissions - though not on other issues such as finance and technology transfer.

Without emission pledges from the US and China, negotiations in Copenhagen would have lacked a large part of the underpinning vital if any kind of deal is to be struck.

But whether developing countries are impressed by the size of the US commitment is another matter.

China itself says it wants developed nations to cut carbon by 40% from 1990 levels by 2020 - and Mr Obama's pledge, at about 3%, is a lot less than that.

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If you've spent the week following every change of direction in the political winds about the likely outcome of the forthcoming UN climate summit, you'll have seen more twisting than the average Chubby Checker song.

Extending borrowing from the arts and entertainment world: "To bind or not to bind" has been the week's big question - but seeing as we've discussed this elsewhere, I'll put it to one side for the moment - while "Hey Johnny - what are you disagreeing about?" "Whaddya got?" would be a popular pick for the most apt exchange.

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN climate convention, made a couple of strong and - taken together - highly indicative statements at a news conference during the week.

The first:

"There is no doubt in my mind that (Copenhagen) will yield a success; almost every day now, we see new commitments and pledges from both industrialised and developing countries."

The second: that the list of countries putting emission targets forward:

"must of course include the United States."

For environment groups, for developing countries, and now for the UN's top climate official, the US holds the key more than any other country to the chances of signing off any kind of agreement in Copenhagen.

For years, under George W Bush, the US was cited as the main obstacle to further deals on limiting climate change.

Now, under a president who emanated change and engagement and all sorts of other radically different vibes during his election campaign, the US is widely seen just one year on as still the major obstacle to a further deal on limiting climate change.

As a non-US citizen, I can't help wondering how that feels inside the country; comments much appreciated.

It's still not clear whether the US will come forward with targets or money or any firm pledges by Copenhagen. Chief negotiator Todd Stern said during the week that it was something that Barack Obama's administration wanted to do, without falling into the Kyoto trap of promising something that it would not be able to deliver.

"What we are looking at is whether we feel that we can put down a number that would be provisional in effect, contingent on getting our legislation done. Our inclination is to try to do that, but we want to be smart about it."

The US may have the will, but it won't have the bill - the Boxer-Kerry legislation, that is, seeking to impose caps on emissions economy-wide.

Senators said this week that it won't come into the Senate before spring - at the earliest.

This timeline makes things very awkward for those who - like Mr de Boer - would like to have a new deal signed and sealed halfway through next year.

If issues such as healthcare reform delay the Boxer-Kerry bill beyond the spring, the US may still not have anything approved by all arms of its governments to put before the international community by the middle of the year.

And what sort of bill might the Senate eventually consider?

A bipartisan group of senators is looking at whether something radically downscaled in ambition would stand a better chance of progress - something that would cap only emissions from power plants and maybe heavy industry.

This would of course have a smaller effect on emissions. It would also lead to the Senate passing a very different bill from the one that went through the House of Representatives in July, meaning the process of reconciling them could take longer afterwards... and so on.

There's a chicken-and-egg-style aspect to all this. The lower expectations are for Copenhagen, the less pressure any senators will feel to push forward.

That's an issue emerging in Australia during the week, where lawmakers appear to be in the final stages of debating legislation that would reduce emissions by 5-15% below 2000 levels by 2020.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is desperate to get the measure through the Senate. But it has been blocked once before; and now Eric Abetz, deputy leader of the Liberal/National opposition party in the upper house, observes:

"Given how Copenhagen seems to be collapsing, there doesn't seem to be any real need to rush".

Following on from the recent upping of lobbying by religious groups, an unusual new player entered the arena during the week in Australia - the United Firefighters Union, who told politicians that they were endangering lives and property if they held up the bill.

As with religious groups, I'm not sure how much influence the men with hoses will have - but if I were standing in the path of one of the forest fires that have caused so much damage in Australia in recent years, I think I'd listen to them.

Those in favour of a strong new deal received some succour during the week from pledges by Russia and South Korea on tackling emissions.

Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev indicated a new target of keeping emissions 25% lower in 2020 than they were in 1990 - strengthened from the previous figure of 10-15%.

The new target still permits a real-world rise in emissions as they're now about 37% below 1990 levels, having plunged when Communist-era industry collapsed in the early 1990s - but it's stronger than before.

More strikingly, South Korea - one of the most developed of the nations that are not quite developed enough to be asked to take on an actual cut in emissions - pledged to make one anyway.

President Lee Myung-bak announced emissions will fall by about 4% between now and 2020 - a 30% reduction in the extent to which national emissions would grow without any restraining action.

There had been suggestions (including on this blog) that President Hu Jintao of China might reveal an analogous target during Barack Obama's visit - but nothing materialised, for reasons about which we can only speculate, but (speculating here) are presumably connected to the Obama administration's non-offering of targets on money and mitigation.

Still more heart will be taken from India's just-announced plan for a thousand-fold expansion in solar power over the next 12 years - a plan that will presumably mean building fewer coal-fired power stations.

Meanwhile, lots of the discourse around legally-binding agreements and politically binding deals and so on has gone on without much reference to the fact that some countries might simply not sign anything in Copenhagen that falls below their minimum expectations.

"We should not allow any country to turn a political failure into a media success," the Marshall Islands' UN Ambassador Phillip Muller said mid-week.

Would small-island developing states and the least developed nations of Africa withhold their signatures if they felt that only a fig leaf were being proffered in Copenhagen?

We don't really know the final negotiations positions of any countries and blocs, but it has to be a possibility, I suggest, that might concentrate minds in the west.

Also concentrating minds, perhaps, will be a new analysis of emissions trends released during the week in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.

Remember that G8 pledge to hold warming to 2C? According to the Global Carbon Project, current emissions trends are taking the world in the direction of 5-6C: a world of rising sea levels, drought across much of the tropics and drastically declining agricultural yields.

Perhaps someone somewhere will think of having a global treaty to sort all that out. Oh - hang on a minute...

As always, if you think I've missed something important in this weekly round-up, please post a comment.

Update 2309: Because comments were posted quoting excerpts apparently from the hacked Climate Research Unit e-mails, and because there are potential legal issues connected with publishing this material, we have temporarily removed all comments until we can ensure that watertight oversight is in place.

Update 2 - 0930 GMT Monday 23 November: We have now re-opened comments on this post. However, legal considerations mean that we will not publish comments quoting from e-mails purporting to be those stolen from the University of East Anglia, nor comments linking to other sites quoting from that material.

Update 3 - 2116 GMT Monday 23 November: As lots of material apparently from the stolen batch of CRU e-mails is now in the public domain, we will not from now on be removing comments simply because they quote from these e-mails.

However, an important couple of caveats: a) the authenticity of most of the material has not to our knowledge been confirmed, and b) it would be easy when posting quotes to break inadvertently some of the House Rules - such as the one barring posting of contact details - which are still in operation and which will see comments being blocked.

In addition to our news story and Roger Harrabin's analysis, those of you enraptured by this issue will probably have noticed Paul Hudson's post on his climate blog, and Martin Rosenbaum's post on his Freedom of Information blog. If not - enjoy. There's also a comment board open at the moment on climate change generally that you might want to plaster.

Again - there's nothing at all barring comments on the original blog topic...

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A couple of weeks ago, the cat came well and truly out of the bag: there would not be a legally binding treaty at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen next month.

Or will there?

During his meeting on Tuesday with China's President Hu Jintao, President Obama appeared to indicate that some sort of comprehensive agreement was still possible.

Then, Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen, speaking to a pre-summit meeting of environment ministers, called for developed nations to bring firm targets to Copenhagen - targets that should be binding.

All of this is very much at odds with statements from a number of European officials and ministers during and directly after the recent UN negotiating session in Barcelona, which were variations on the theme that a legally-binding deal was "unlikely", "extremely unlikely" or "impossible".

It certainly poses more questions. What does "legally binding" mean in this context? What does the alternative being bandied around - "politically binding" - mean?

And where does the formulation that President Obama used in his Beijing speech - "not a partial accord or a political declaration, but rather an accord that covers all of the issues in the negotiations and one that has immediate operational effect" - fit in to the overall picture?

We are into a miasma of nuance here; but for different parties, all of the nuances are important, so it's worth having a look at what's being suggested, what might actually transpire, and who's likely to be happy or unhappy.

So let's go back to the Bali meeting nearly two years ago and the pledge, in the Bali Action Plan (BAP), to produce something new by Copenhagen.

The BAP doesn't actually prescribe a legally-binding treaty, although that's an interpretation and an outcome that's been accepted by most governments as desirable and necessary.

You could argue that something legally-binding is implied by the agreement that all developed countries must adopt "measurable, reportable and verifiable nationally appropriate mitigation commitments or actions, including quantified emission limitation and reduction objectives".

What is explicit is that a Copenhagen agreement must "achieve the ultimate objective of the [UN climate] convention" - in other words, must stabilise "greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system".

In the broadest sense, then, there is acknowledgement by all governments that everything enacted before - the UN climate convention of 1992, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 - could not achieve that goal, and something new was needed.

That "something else", according to BAP, would have to be bigger and bolder, encompassing emissions cuts by rich countries, curbs on the rate of growth of emissions by major developing countries, and finance and technology transfer to help poorer countries constrain their emissions and adapt to climate impacts.

It was described by UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband as the most complex set of international negotiations ever, on any issue.

Two principal factors now line up to prevent a full binding treaty emerging in Copenhagen. One is the sheer amount of negotiating needed in a tight period of time; the other is that the US has yet to put any commitments on the table and may not do so before the summit.

What a number of developing countries are still demanding - joined, apparently, by Mr Rasmussen - is something that is firmly binding even though it might not carry any formally legal weight, let alone the paraphernalia of a full treaty.

But how can that be?

Recall first that these treaties don't become binding on anyone until they've been ratified by enough countries to gain the status of international law. In the case of Kyoto, that took eight years - and in the case of Copenhagen, we don't yet have an agreement on the legal form of any treaty, let alone what would trigger its adoption as law.

Secondly, one of the bases for the Copenhagen process has been that "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed".

(A better phrase might be "nothing is binding until everything is binding, because certain things such as an agreement on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) could conceivably emerge as a self-standing entity whatever the carnage around it.")

Are governments really going to grant binding status to something that includes main numbers on emissions targets and finance, but omits details that for some nations might turn out to be crucial? This has to be a consensus of 192 countries, not a majority vote.

Thirdly, what is there except international law that can bind countries to anything?

When it comes to the form and status of something that is not international law but is more than just a promise, I for one am out of ideas; if anyone has a clearer notion, I'd be very happy if you can spell it out for us in a comment.

A fourth issue is that some countries are very unhappy about signing up to anything that is not legally binding. A number of developing nations including Sudan (chair of the G77/China bloc), Grenada and Barbados have been making noises about not agreeing to anything that is not legally binding.

Their position is that we had the politically-binding agreement in Bali. In a sense, we had it in Rio; this is supposed to be the time for delivery on those fine words.

And it not just small developing countries; a number of European delegates have said that no deal is better than a bad deal, and presumably if they do not see the requisite amount of "binding" in the text, they will not sign, whatever embarrassment that might cause the Danish hosts.

The runes on this story appear to shift their shape daily. Experienced negotiators and observers suggest the fog is unlikely to clear before the final Copenhagen dawn on December 18th.

To the outside observer, it might seem a strange old way to try and solve a problem that most governments acknowledge as a serious and urgent threat to humanity's prospects.

But if there's one thing that governments appear to consider truly binding in this process, it's the requirement to obfuscate and procrastinate right down to the wire.

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