US frustrates climate change meeting
UN CLIMATE negotiators in Bonn were left frustrated yesterday as the White House postponed a meeting to determine whether America will stay in the 196nation Paris Agreement to curb planetharming fossil fuel.
As uncertainty mounted over the hardfought pact’s future under US President Donald Trump, China’s leader Xi Jinping vowed to protect it.
China and France “should protect the achievements of global governance, including the Paris Agreement”, the Foreign Ministry in Beijing quoted Xi as tell- ing his newly elected counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, in a phone call.
Trump has yet to announce whether he intends keeping a campaign promise to withdraw Washington from the hardfought agreement in whose birth his predecessor, Barack Obama, and Xi were instrumental.
Negotiators in Bonn had their eyes firmly on a White House meeting called to discuss the topic yesterday, but a senior administration official confirmed: “It’s been postponed.” No new date was given. The May 8-18 Bonn meeting is meant to start designing a “rulebook” for imple- menting the global deal to limit average global warming to 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. This is the ceiling at which scientists say we can avoid worstcase-scenario climate change impacts – rising seas, harsher droughts, more intense storms, disease-spread and conflict over dwindling natural resources.
A total of 196 countries are now parties to the climate deal clinched in 2015 after years of tough bartering.
The agreement was savaged by a campaigning Trump, who threatened to “cancel” it if elected.
With the rest of the world waiting for finality ever since, the new president has said he will make his decision before the next G7 meeting on May 26-27 in Sicily.
On Monday, the US deputy assistant secretary for international environmental affairs, David Balton, said the decision would likely be taken “over the next couple of weeks, but not this week”.
The Bonn talks have been overshadowed by fears that the world’s number two carbon polluter will pull out of the agreement and throw the process into disarray. At an open session late on Monday, speaker after speaker reiterated the deal must not be “renegotiated” – a proposal of Trump’s Energy Secretary Rick Perry.