The measures included expanded research and deployment of new energy-saving technologies, improvement of agricultural infrastructure, increased tree-planting and water resource management and greater public awareness of the issue.

Ma said implementation will "cost a fortune" but did not elaborate, stressing that it would be an investment in prevention.

Given an economy that has been growing at better than 9 percent annually over the past 25 years, the plan's overall effect, if implemented, would be to slow the increase in greenhouse gases, not reduce their absolute amount.

Monday's release of the report seemed in part an attempt to pre-empt criticism of China's environmental policies.

Assistant Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai said President Hu Jintao will "expand China's views and propositions on climate change" at a summit of the Group of Eight industrialized nations in Germany this Friday. The summit will feature a session on global warming.

China has fallen under increasing pressure internationally to take more forceful measures to curb releases of greenhouse gases.

In explaining the new program, Ma said global warming was largely caused by 200 years of unrestrained industrialization by the West, and it would be unfair to impose mandatory emissions caps on China and other developing nations.

"It is neither realistic nor fair to ... overlook the different stages of development that different countries are in and to use climate change as an excuse to ask them to undertake quantified emissions reductions commitments," Ma said.

He added: "This would hinder the development of developing countries and hamper their industrialization."

Ma called President Bush's new initiative on global warming a "useful complement" to the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol, but said that it should not be a substitute for the treaty, which expires in 2012.

Bush last week proposed the 15 biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses hold meetings and set an emissions goal, but he would let each country - including the U.S., China, India and the major European countries - decide individually how to implement it.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol is an international treaty that caps the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted from power plants and factories in industrialized countries. Developing countries like China and India are exempt from its obligations.

Chen Dongmei, director of WWF China's Climate Change and Energy Program, said the nature conservation group welcomed the NDRC's report because it was "the first time the national government is talking about energy reduction."

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