copyright 2009, The Washington Post WASHINGTON -- Buried in the text of Tuesday's joint declaration between the President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao was a significant climate announcement: The Obama administration will offer concrete emission reduction targets as part of next month's negotiations, as long as the Chinese offer a climate proposal of their own. The question of whether the United States would identify a short-term emission goal has been one of the main sticking points in the United Nations-sponsored talks for nearly a year. Almost all industrialized nations, and many major developing countries, have announced how much they plan to curb their greenhouse gas output by 2020. Neither the United States nor China -- which is not obligated to do so under the U.N. framework, even though it now ranks as the world's biggest carbon emitter -- has done so, thereby hampering the prospects of an agreement. Just this weekend the Obama administration endorsed a proposal by the Danish government to seek a political agreement on global warming in Copenhagen next month, which could be codified in 2010 as a legally-binding international treaty. According to the joint declaration, 'an agreed outcome at Copenhagen should ... include emission reduction targets of developed countries and nationally appropriate mitigation actions of developing countries.' In an interview last week, the U.S. special envoy for climate change Todd Stern said any emission reduction target America adopts on an international level would be contingent on domestic legislation, which has yet to be finalized. The House-passed climate bill includes a 17 percent reduction in greenhouse gases compared to 2005 levels; the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has approved a 20 percent cut over the same period, but key senators such as Max Baucus, D-Mont., have vowed to lower that level of ambition. Michael Levi, a senior fellow on environment and energy issues at the Environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the U.S.-China declaration 'has moved expectations up a bit for Copenhagen.' Levi added it was significant that the Chinese signed off on language saying any successful outcome in Copenhagen would 'provide for full transparency' when it came to greenhouse gas cuts, since lawmakers in the United States and other nations have questioned whether they will be able to verify actions by China and other developing nations. 'There will be no viable international deal without far more transparency than the Kyoto Protocol mandates,' he said, referring to the 1997 climate treaty. Obama and Hu also endorsed a package of bilateral clean energy projects, most of which have been in the works for some time and which fell short of what some people in the energy industry had hoped. The package highlights areas of growing cooperation between the two nations, but did not include any big commitment of new resources or the announcement of any new commercial scale joint developments. The two presidents formally announced the creation of a U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center supported by $150 million of public and private money, contributed evenly by the two nations over a period of five years. The center is to promote joint research and serve as an information clearinghouse. Obama and Hu also announced initiatives to promote cooperation on research and development of carbon capture and storage projects, methane capture, electric vehicles and shale gas. South Korea, which is President Obama's next stop in Asia, announced Tuesday it would cut its emissions 30 percent compared to what they otherwise would have been by 2020, which equates to a 4 percent reduction compared to 2005 levels. South Korea's greenhouse gas output has nearly doubled over the past 15 years. 