Paris climate talks into 11th-hour over sharing costs

“Hollow promises and hollow slogans won’t work”, Indian Environment, Forests and Climate Change Minister Prakash Javadekar told Indian reporters here, following his meeting with the U.S. delegation led by Secretary of State John Kerry.

French foreign minister Laurent Fabius, who is chairing the talks, said: “We are nearly at the end of the road”, as he outlined plans to publish the final draft on Saturday morning.

Sleep-starved envoys tasked with saving mankind from catastrophic climate change aim to wrap up a historic Paris accord on Saturday after battling through a second all-night session of United Nations talks, the French hosts said. “Things are going on in right direction”, according to the Economic Times newspaper.

As it stands, the agreement seeks to keep temperature rises to “well below” 2C above pre-industrial levels – beyond which risky 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”, says a rep for advocacy group Avaaz. “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”. “I sincerely hope that the negotiators and Ministers will take the leadership in negotiation and engagement and their wise decision, there are still several outstanding issues, like differentiation, ambitions and climate financing”, he added.

Ministers from more than 190 countries are gearing up to work through the night again at the summit in Paris to secure a final draft of the deal as the talks slip past their official Friday evening deadline.

The rich countries have been pushing the poorer nations to do more, while 134 developing countries argue that the rich countries should bear the responsibility because they have been producing the most greenhouse gases for over a century.

US President Barack Obama shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping during their meeting at the start of the climate summit in Paris on November 30, 2015.

The latest draft of a new global climate agreement was met with cautious optimism on Thursday night, as the clock ticks down on the 21st Conference of the Parties, or COP21, in Paris.

Anderson said because the Paris draft proposal dropped any discussions about carbon dioxide emissions from shipping and airplanes, he considers it “weaker than that which came out of Copenhagen” in 2009.

The biggest challenge is to define the responsibilities of wealthy nations, which have polluted the most historically, and developing economies including China and India where emissions are growing the fastest.

Rich nations would scale up public and private finance after 2020 from their pledged 100 billion USA dollars (£60 billion) a year, to support developing countries in coping with the impacts of climate change and to develop cleanly, under the draft deal.

“The atmosphere between the parties has been the best that I have seen in the last 10 years of COPs [Conference of the Parties, the name of the major annual United Nations climate summit]”. One option said such “loss and damage” would be addressed in a way that doesn’t involve liability and compensation – a US demand.

Ban Ki-moon said Friday that negotiators are still in disagreement over how far-reaching the accord should be and who should pay for damages wrought by global warming.