Negotiators from more than 190 countries are trying to do something that’s never been done: reach a deal for all countries to reduce man-made carbon emissions and cooperate to adapt to rising seas and increasingly extreme weather caused by human activity. Early in the Friday morning, delegates broke into smaller groups to iron out their differences.
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Kerry said some envoys “have been working quietly behind the scenes to work out compromises ahead of time” but he would not elaborate on what those were. He wouldn’t elaborate on which issues.
Kaiser contends the draft deal “kicks that can down the road, saying ‘we’ll sort it in 10 or 15 years”.
But Liu Zhenmin, deputy chief of the Chinese delegation, told reporters Friday that issue is “at the core of our concern for the Paris agreement”.
Despite 48 hours of crunch time talks that have gone on late into the night on two days amid pressure from civil society for an ambitious temperature goal of 1.5 degrees C, Mr. Fabius and the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon acknowledged that the stalemate over the differentiation question between rich and poor countries on their obligations, provision of finance for developing and vulnerable countries, and the underpinning ambition for temperature rise had to be resolved.
“There are still outstanding issues”, Ban said, adding that he is “convinced and confident” that negotiators will reach an “ambitious, strong accord”.
The leaders of the world’s two biggest economies, and its two biggest polluters, discussed the crunch talks by telephone, according to officials in Beijing and Washington. United Nations climate conferences often run past their deadlines, given the complexity and sensitivity of each word in an global agreement and the consequences for national economies.
As it stands, the agreement seeks to keep temperature rises to “well below” 2C above pre-industrial levels – beyond which unsafe climate change is expected – as well as to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C, which vulnerable countries say is necessary to their very survival. We would rather they take their time and were patient with the right deal than rush it and get a breakdown…
“Who will take that action”, he asked rhetorically answering that its the Western countries which had to agree to this and come up with more money to make developing nations help cope with this. “Getting them to agree on the future of the planet and a deal on climate change is probably one of the toughest pieces of negotiation they’ll ever get involved in”.
“We are going backwards”, said Gurdial Singh Nijar of Malaysia, the head of a bloc of hardline countries that also includes India, China and Saudi Arabia.
The U.S. and European countries want to move away from so-called “differentiation” among economies and want big emerging countries like China and India to pitch in more in a final climate deal.
“We still have some distance to cover before reaching our final deal, and some key issues remain unresolved”, said foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying today.
Also controversial is who should pay the hundreds of billions of dollars required to help developing countries shift from fossil fuels that produce carbon dioxide (CO2) to lower-carbon energy sources.
“We can not just switch overnight… and go to renewables”, says a Malaysian negotiator.
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Late on Thursday, Fabius unveiled a slightly trimmed 27-page draft text that removed some main points of contention.
