NEW YORK — Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed hope Thursday that the ‘active debate” in the U.S. administration and Congress on global warming will spur the United States to take a leadership role in combatting climate change. The U.N. chief was addressing a student conference on global warming that brought hundreds of high-schoolers from around the world to the U.N. General Assembly hall. One student asked what Ban thought about the rejection by President Bush’s administration of the Kyoto protocol, a 1997 pact that requires 35 industrial nations to cut their global-warming gases by an average 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. ‘I have a sense of active discussion within the U.S. government and Congress regarding the Kyoto protocol,” Ban said. ‘And this kind of active debate has helped raise its profile and public interest in climate change.” Ban also said that climate change poses as great of a danger to the world as war. ‘The majority of the U.N.’s work still focuses on preventing and ending conflict,” Ban said. ‘But the danger posed by war to all of humanity - and to our planet - is at least matched by the climate crisis and […]