"Nationwide, the situation surrounding energy saving and reducing emissions remains quite grim," Wen said in remarks Web cast on the central government Web site (www.gov.cn).

"We must make saving energy and reducing [pollution] emissions a focus of current strengthening of macro controls."

China needed to curtail excessive growth in industries including power generation, metal production, construction materials, oil refining, and chemicals, Wen said.

He repeated a call to stop incentives to invest in energy-sapping sectors. The initiatives he spelled out were largely repetitions of past announcements, but together with a stream of other recent warnings, his speech suggested increased urgency from top leaders.

Fast-industrialising China could overtake the United States as the world's top emitter of human-generated greenhouse gases as early as this year, and Beijing faces rising international calls to accept mandatory caps on carbon dioxide emissions from factories, fields and vehicles.

China has repeatedly rejected accepting international greenhouse gas caps, but more clearly than before, Wen linked his country's energy-saving efforts to global warming worries.

"Strengthening efforts to save energy and reduce [pollution] emissions is also urgently needed as a response to global climate change," he said.

"Our country is an energy producing and consuming power that is based on coal, and reducing pollution emissions is a responsibility we should assume."

Officials should "correct" the beneficial power, land and tax policies those industries have enjoyed, and take more steps to curb their exports, Wen said.

He proposed reducing tax rebates on exports, cutting export quotas and raising export taxes. Local governments with the cash should also help pay to scrap outdated production, he said.

China aims to reduce emissions of major industrial pollutants by 10 percent and cut the amount of energy used to generate each dollar of national income by 20 percent between 2006 and 2010.

But this year, Wen and other officials have declined to spell out annual targets for energy efficiency and cutting pollution. In his speech, too, Wen did not give any specific numbers.

China's targets to raise energy efficiency and reduce emissions "must be accomplished", Wen said. If this year's targets are not met, he said, reaching the five-year goal would be all the more difficult.

Investment in many high-polluting, resource-intensive industries rose in the first quarter of this year despite Beijing's efforts to limit credit and eliminate export incentives, China's top planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission said.

China has delayed the launch of a national climate plan, originally due to be unveiled on Tuesday, while officials tweak details, sources said.

The country's recently released national assessment of climate change proposes aiming to nearly halve by 2020 the amount of greenhouse gases it emits for each dollar of its economy, but the report rejects China should reject strict caps for decades in order to safeguard economic development.

China's top climate official said in a report on Friday that the threat from global warming was real.

"For our country, adapting to and mitigating the threat from climate change is an urgent task," Zheng Guoguang, head of the China Metereological Administration said in an interview with the People's Daily. "Relatively controlling greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate climate change is becoming more real and pressing."