Laurent Fabius, France’s Foreign Minister, will present to the world the latest text of a climate deal.
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The agreement, which was publicly released Saturday morning (ET), sets the goal of limiting the world’s rise in average temperature to “well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius”. Some delegates wept and others embraced.
“They want a flexible, robust, meaningful, universal agreement that will help us rise as one to the climate challenge”. That’s because the less we pollute, the less pollution nature absorbs.
“I have been attending many hard multilateral negotiations, but by any standard, by far, this negotiation is most complicated, most hard but most important for humanity”.
The global climate summit in Paris agreed a landmark accord on Saturday, setting the course for a “historic” transformation of the world’s fossil fuel-driven economy within decades in a bid to arrest global warming.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has made an impassioned entreaty to world diplomats negotiating a potential accord to fight global warming.
“The solutions to climate change are on the table”. It is already 1 degree C higher. But those pledges are not enough to achieve the goals in the accord, meaning countries will need to cut much more to meet the goal.
Climate Institute chief executive John Connor said Australia would have to “urgently” lift its game on pollution targets and climate finance for poorer countries if it wanted to maintain integrity. “It’s a whole lot of pomp, given the circumstances”.
To do so, the emissions of greenhouse gases will need to peak “as soon as possible”, followed by rapid reductions, the agreement states.
The new text says developed countries shall provide financial resources to assist developing countries and “other parties are encouraged to provide or continue to provide such support voluntarily”.
The draft also addressed the European Union demand for five-year cycles to review climate plans with pressure to make them more ambitious over time, is also in the draft. In the United States, the Clinton administration signed the agreement but, fearing defeat, never submitted it to the Senate for ratification. “And you need to drive your auto”, Liu said.
Nicaragua said it would not support the pact.
To lengthy applause and a standing ovation, he said the legally binding agreement represented a balanced version of a document forged by all 196 parties together.
To amplify that message, up to 10,000 protesters are expected to gather in Paris mid-day for a public demonstration that will test the tolerance of French authorities. People held hands beneath the Eiffel Tower and stretched a two-kilometer-long (1.2-mile-long) banner from the Arc de Triomphe to the business district La Defense. He called for declaring “a state of climate emergency”. Ban said he’s “convinced and confident” that negotiators will reach an “ambitious, strong accord”.
Sopoaga, the Tuvalu leader, said he had discussed the issue with Kerry and that he was optimistic that a solution would be found.
Countries must agree by consensus.
Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga of the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu was also upbeat. The agreement struck a middle ground, removing a strict firewall between rich and poor nations and saying that expectations on countries to take climate action should grow as their capabilities evolve.
And because the Paris draft removes discussion of carbon dioxide emissions from shipping and air travel, Anderson said he considers the Paris proposal even weaker than the one that came out of Copenhagen in 2009.
By the second half of this century, there must be a balance between the emissions from human activity like energy production and farming, and the amount that can be captured by natural or technological “sinks” like carbon-absorbing forests or carbon storage plants. We have to take that last stand to reach our goal.
And in the United States, many Republicans will see the pact as a risky endeavor that threatens to trade economic prosperity for an uncertain if greener future.
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“It’s only the beginning”, Hollande said.
