Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Friday, March 29th, 2024

U.N. Climate Negotiators Sweat over Detail and Divides

U.N. Climate Negotiators Sweat over Detail and Divides

KATOWICE, Poland - Half-way through talks to breathe life into the Paris climate deal negotiators haggled over how to share the cost of curbing global warming and struggled to bridge deep political divides.
The two weeks of talks, which began at the start of the week, are billed as the most important U.N. conference since the Paris 2015 agreement on climate change.
The challenge is to meet a year-end deadline to agree a rule book to limit global warming, when the unity that underpinned the Paris talks has fragmented. U.S. President Donald Trump repeated his call to scrap the Paris climate pact.
By the end of Saturday, negotiators aim to have a simplified a draft for high-level ministerial debate starting on Monday.
“We still have a lot to do,” Michal Kurtyka, the Polish president of the U.N. talks, told a news conference. “It is very technical, very complex, very difficult.” Delegates said a major issue was how to reassure developing countries that richer nations would deliver on promises to help finance the cost of shifting to a lower carbon economy.
Environmental campaigners are concerned the Katowice talks will lack ambition, after the United States said this year it was withdrawing from the U.N. process. Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, in the talks on Saturday added a further challenge by blocking consensus on a major scientific report.
The U.N. report published in October said it was possible to limit the earth’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius and prevent damaging levels of global warming provided radical changes in energy consumption and other steps were implemented.  (Reuters)