 Developing countries, including emerging economic giants China and India, are not prepared to take the blame for climate change, the head of the G77 group of developing nations said on Tuesday. Some countries in Europe and North America want developing countries to accept limits on their emissions of greenhouse gases when the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol runs out in 2012, but the G77 looks likely to oppose that. "Most environmental degradation that's happened has been historically caused by the industrial world," said Munir Akram, Pakistan's permanent representative to the United Nations and chairman of the G77 group in New York. "China, India and others are at the stage where they are now taking off and it's quite natural that their emissions of carbon are increasing," he told a news conference after a two-day meeting of G77 diplomats in Rome. "There's a sort of propaganda effort to try to shift the blame for environmental degradation on to these fast-growing economies, and the motives are not very well disguised." One of the main reasons US President George W. Bush pulled his country out of Kyoto was that the 1997 UN treaty only imposed emissions limits on developed countries. The European Union remained in the pact but wants developing countries included in a second phase treaty which will be discussed at a UN climate change meeting in Bali, Indonesia in December. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) latest report, released earlier this month, predicted global temperatures would rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 Celsius (3.2 and 7.8 Fahrenheit) this century due to the greenhouse effect. Emissions from industry and transport, especially carbon dioxide (CO2), a by-product of burning fossil fuels like oil and coal, are blamed for trapping heat in the atmosphere in a process set to increase disasters like floods and droughts. "The developing countries contribute the least to environmental degradation but are affected the most," read a statement issued by the G77 after the Rome meeting, which covered everything from aid to UN reform. With China's economy growing at 10 percent a year its appetite for fuel is increasing rapidly and the country is believed to be building a coal-fired power station every five days -- a major source of CO2. But Akram said any efforts to limit developing country emissions in the coming years would be viewed with suspicion, especially as most developed nations had made little progress in cutting theirs. "Unless the North comes to grips with its responsibility it will be difficult to come to an international consensus by which all of us can contribute to halting the degradation of the environment, and certainly stopping the development of developing countries is not the answer."