By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

HONOLULU, Jan 31 (Reuters) - The Bush administration's environment policy chief sounded optimistic on Thursday about U.S.-hosted climate change talks, noting a mood shift among the world's biggest greenhouse polluting countries.

In contrast to grumbling at the fringes of the first U.S.-sponsored conference on the issue in September, representatives of 17 major economies at the Hawaii meeting are now ready to talk about specific things to do to combat climate change, said James Connaughton, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

"You're not seeing the questioning, the concerns, you're not seeing that," Connaughton said in an interview on the second and final day of the closed-door sessions. "If anything, the main point of uncertainty to the discussions is how we schedule and organize ourselves over the next five to six months."

The so-called major economies -- the Group of Eight industrialized nations plus fast-developing China and India along with Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea and the European Union -- are meant to work together to spur the U.N negotiations on climate change.

The goal is to craft an international agreement to succeed the carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. To make sure the new agreement is ready in time, a new pact needs to be ready by 2009.

The United States, by most counts the world's biggest emitter of climate-warming carbon dioxide, rejects Kyoto, arguing it unfairly exempts China and India and that any new agreement must include all countries.

Outside the September meeting in Washington, some delegates complained the United States was isolated for its stand against Kyoto and that the U.S.-led process had the potential to distract from rather than contribute to the U.N. negotiations.

"We're now getting into some very specific areas on some issues that are quite sensitive and we are working hard to more clearly understand the different perspectives of different delegations and look for common ground," Connaughton said of Thursday's talks in Honolulu. "And that is the spirit of this meeting."

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, said on Wednesday the new mood at the latest U.S.-sponsored talks was due to what happened at a global meeting in Bali, Indonesia, in December.

That contentious meeting, where U.S. delegates were booed for opposing demands by poor nations for the rich countries to do more to help fight global warming, yielded a "road map" for two years of negotiations leading up to the 2009 deadline.

Those negotiations are meant to figure out how to adapt to the ill effects of climate change, cut greenhouse gas emissions that cause the problem, learn to use new environmental technology and determine how to finance it all. (Editing by Peter Cooney) (For more Reuters information on the environment, see http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/)

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