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Talks on a 190-nation deal to fight global warming were on a "knife edge" on Thursday as Bolivia stuck to hardline demands and accused capitalist climate policies of causing genocide.

A deadlock between rich and poor countries on whether to extend the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol, which obliges almost 40 rich nations to curb greenhouse gas emissions until 2012, continued to overshadow the two-week meeting in Mexico, which is due to end on Friday.
"It's on a knife edge, we could well have a good outcome but we could also have a car crash," said Chris Huhne, Britain's energy and climate change secretary, who is co-leading talks on Kyoto at the two-week meeting in the Caribbean resort of Cancun.
If they solve the dispute over Kyoto, negotiators are aiming to set up a new fund to help developing countries cope with climate change, work out ways to preserve tropical forests and agree a new mechanism to share clean technologies.
Bolivia's left-wing President Evo Morales reiterated calls for radical cuts in greenhouse gases under Kyoto to protect the earth, saying capitalism was the root cause of financial, energy, climate and food crises.
He said 300,000 people die annually from droughts, floods, desertification, storms and rising seas caused by greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution. He described the deaths as "genocide" caused by capitalism.
"If we here in Cancun throw out the Kyoto Protocol then we will be responsible for eco-cide, which is the equivalent of genocide," he said, calling for creation of a new court to try climate "crimes."
Bolivia's demands, including that rich nations cut in half their greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2017, go beyond those even of the poorest African states and small island states that are among the most vulnerable to a changing climate.
Some diplomats fear that Bolivia's position could derail the entire conference, where any deals require unanimity.
MODEST AMBITIONS
Ambitions for Cancun are already modest after the U.N summit in Copenhagen last year failed to agree a binding deal, partly because of oppostion from a handful of nations including Bolivia and Sudan.
Japan (NYSE: MCO - news) 's Environment Minister Ryu Matsumoto reiterated that Tokyo will not sign up to new cuts under an extension of Kyoto, a position that has angered the developing nations.
He said Tokyo wants instead a new U.N. deal that binds Kyoto countries and all big polluters including the United States, China and India to limit their emissions.
The developing nations say Kyoto members, most responsible for emitting greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution, must show the way and unilaterally agree to extend Kyoto into a second period.
"The outcome is still very uncertain," Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh told Reuters.
"The Japanese are clearly signalling that they don't want to be the people who brought the conference to failure, I hope that we are going to make progress there, but it's not a done deal," said Huhne.
"We're not going to get a complete resolution of the issues around the legal form of what ultimately emerges, the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol," he said, adding that Venezuela and Cuba also want faster progress on the second commitment period.
"The real question is whether people recognise we won't get that here and that we have to have a balance that preserves people's positions to fight another day ... and enable progress on all the other areas."
For Reuters latest environment blogs, click on: http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/ (Writing by Alister Doyle and Gerard Wynn; Editing by Kieran Murray)