Throughout the floor debate, Democrats mocked Republicans who they said were “in denial” about the science and impact of climate change.
Advertisement
During his opening remarks, Obama actually went 11 minutes over schedule.
Noting that developed countries bore more responsibility for past fossil fuel use that accelerated climate change, Modi wrote that “justice demands that, with what little carbon we can still safely burn, developing countries are allowed to grow”.
Many observers are skeptical about the value of the Paris agreement if it is not legally binding. “Leaders still have the scars of Copenhagen on their hearts and brains”, Yvo de Boer, who was the U.N.’s climate chief in Copenhagen, said.
Obama says Republicans who now say they oppose an worldwide agreement to reduce carbon emissions are “playing to a narrow constituency” but would feel differently if they won the presidency and felt the pressure of leading a global community.
Signalling their determination to resolve the most intractable points, senior negotiators sat down on Sunday, a day earlier than planned, to begin their work.
France pledged on Tuesday to give African countries more than €2 billion ($2.1 billion) over the next four years to develop renewable energy and to increase the African continent’s access to electricity, French President Francois Hollande said Tuesday.
At a news conference Tuesday morning, Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., was asked about the majority support in the United States for action on climate change and whether Congress was out of step with public opinion.
Obama’s efforts to reassure developing countries have been hampered by the fact that the GOP-dominated Congress “is blocking the first installment of the $3 billion he pledged to a UN fund to help developing nations transition to cleaner energy and cope with the effects of climate change”. “The reason is because this one trend, climate change, affects all trends”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin called climate change “one of the greatest threats humanity is facing”.
“Although the targets themselves may not have the force of treaties, the process, the procedures that ensure transparency and periodic reviews, that needs to be legally binding”, Obama said in Paris, “and that’s going to be critical”.
Obama also said on the sidelines of the negotiations that parts of any accord should be binding to hold countries accountable, according to the Associated Press.
“So, although everyone here is unified in the desire to address climate change, economic interests play a role as well”.
Obama told reporters he’s “convinced that we’re going to get big things done here”.
Security has been tightened after Islamist militants killed 130 people on November 13, and Hollande said he could not separate “the fight with terrorism from the fight against global warming”.
Advertisement
He says it’s important to “send a message to the climate conference” that there’s disagreement with the policies of the president. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told the negotiators. The same officials have said that these companies are major polluters and they are nothing more than a part of the problem.
