(L-R) France's Minister of Ecology and the Environment Segolene Royal
and France's Foreign Affairs Minister Laurent Fabius greet US President
Barack Obama as France's President Francois Hollande greets US Secretary
of State John Kerry during the arrivals for the COP21 United Nations
Climate Change Conference on November 30, 2015 in Le Bourget, outside
Paris. PHOTO | CHRISTOPHE ENA |
AFP
By REUTERS
In Summary
- Warnings from climate scientists, demands from activists and exhortations from religious leaders like Pope Francis, coupled with major advances in cleaner energy sources like solar power, have all added to pressure to cut the carbon emissions held responsible for warming the planet.
World leaders will launch an ambitious attempt on
Monday to hold back the earth's rising temperatures, urging each other
to find common cause in two weeks of bargaining meant to steer the
global economy away from dependence on fossil fuels.
They arrive at United Nations climate change talks in Paris
armed with promises and accompanied by high expectations. After decades
of struggling negotiations marked by the failure of a previous summit in
Copenhagen six years ago, some form of landmark agreement appears all
but assured by mid-December.
Warnings from climate scientists, demands from
activists and exhortations from religious leaders like Pope Francis,
coupled with major advances in cleaner energy sources like solar power,
have all added to pressure to cut the carbon emissions held responsible
for warming the planet.
Most scientists say failure to agree on strong
measures in Paris would doom the world to ever-hotter average
temperatures, bringing with them deadlier storms, more frequent droughts
and rising sea levels as polar ice caps melt.
Facing such alarming projections, the leaders of
more than 150 countries responsible for about 90 per cent of the world's
greenhouse gas emissions have come bearing pledges to reduce their
national carbon output, though by different degrees.
Achieving an international agreement committing
both rich and developing nations to the fight against global warming
would mean "we can have confidence that we’re doing right by future
generations," U.S. President Barack Obama said earlier this month.
“It is the future of humanity that is at stake at
this conference,” French President Francois Hollande told 20 Minutes
newspaper. “History will severely judge the heads of government if, in
December, they miss this opportunity.”
On the eve of the summit, hundreds of thousands of
people from Australia to Paraguay joined the biggest day of climate
change activism in history, telling world leaders there was "No Planet
B" in the fight against global warming.
French police detained scores of protesters after
violent clashes in the centre of Paris. The police fired tear gas to
disperse about 200 protesters, some of them masked, who responded by
hurling rocks and candles at them.
Smoothing the bumps
The leaders will gather in a vast conference centre
at the Le Bourget airfield near the spot where Charles Lindbergh landed
his Spirit of St. Louis aircraft in 1927 after making the first solo
trans-Atlantic flight, a feat that helped bring nations closer.
Whether a similar spirit of unity can be incubated
in Le Bourget this time is uncertain. In all, 195 countries are part of
the unwieldy negotiating process, espousing a variety of leadership
styles and ideologies that has made consensus elusive in the past. Key
issues, notably how to divide the global bill to pay for a shift to
renewable energy, are still contentious.
Signalling their determination to resolve the most
intractable points, senior negotiators sat down on Sunday, a day earlier
than originally planned, to begin thrashing out an agreement.
The last attempt to get a global deal collapsed in
chaos and acrimony in Copenhagen in 2009. It ended with Obama forcing
his way on the gathering's last day into a closed meeting of China and
other countries, emerging with a modest concession to limit rising
emissions until 2020 that they attempted to impose on the rest of the
world
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