China, India and the U.S. have taken a few steps closer to reducing global greenhouse emissions within the next decade, the Wall Street Journal reported. They have pledged to join a pact which will reduce global pollution by 2020 in an 11th hour deal before dawn on Sunday.

This breaks an impasse between the three countries which had stalled negotiations. The breakthrough came during a meeting two days after the U.N.-sponsored meetings were supposed to end. Delegates from nearly 200 nations were on hand to agree to draft a new global emissions treaty by 2015.

Under the agreement, most industrialized nations, including the European Union, will extend the emission standards required under the Kyoto protocol. 

The pledge from China, India and the U.S. to sign on is significant because they are the three largest greenhouse polluters not covered by Kyoto.

The agreement has brought criticisms from scientists who say the agreement doesn't go far enough, ABC reports.

"We avoided a train wreck and we got some useful incremental decisions," said Alden Meyer, of the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists. "The bad news is that we did very little here to affect the emissions curve which is accelerating, and the impacts of climate change which are climbing day by day."

Some see this as evidence of global inequity. According to the Los Angeles Times:

Facing the prospect of widespread harm, some of which has already begun, developing countries and nongovernmental groups pushed for the nearly 200 participants at the two-week Durban conference to drop their incremental approach to reducing emissions. But major emitters — particularly the U.S. and China, which are the two largest — threw up roadblocks to sweeping change, as many wrestled with struggling economies and political resistance at home.

The United States, in particular, was widely viewed as obstructionist, participants at the meeting said. The U.S. sought unconditional commitments from developing countries including China to slow their rates of emissions growth, even as it remained unclear whether those countries would get financial or technological support to do so.

The U.S. also blocked an idea, accepted by nearly all other governments and the maritime industry, to start financing the fund for poorer countries with a carbon tax on shipping.

The U.S. never signed on to the Kyoto protocol. Even though it was instrumental in its drafting, U.S. Congress refused to ratify the agreement unless developing countries agreed to the same regulations, Bloomberg reports.