Paris climate talks run into overtime

Efforts to craft a global accord to combat climate change stumbled on Friday with China and many other nations refusing to yield ground, forcing host France to extend the U.N. summit by a day to overcome stubborn divisions. “The negotiators have got twenty-four hours to change that simple fact”, the activist remarked. As The Canadian Press reports, the province has promised that all new vehicles will be emissions-free by mid-century. They are expected to come up with another draft agreement text on Saturday morning – hopefully, one that can translate into the final agreement.

The International Energy Agency has released its Global Market Outlook for December, predicting global oil markets will remain oversupplied through 2016 as demand growth slows and OPEC producers keep their taps wide open, The Globe and Mail reports.

“The fact is that even if every single American citizen biked to work, carpooled to school, used only solar panels to power their homes, if we each planted a dozen trees, if we somehow eliminated all of our domestic greenhouse gas emissions, guess what – that still wouldn’t be enough to offset the carbon pollution coming from the rest of the world”.

“You have to go to zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 in order to have a fair chance” of reaching the 1.5-degree goal, Schellnhuber said.

The “common but differentiated of responsibilities” was built into the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which required developed countries to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions but required more or less nothing of developing countries.

The latest 27-page draft said governments would aim to peak the emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases “as soon as possible” and strive to reach “emissions neutrality” by the second half of the century – a vague term generally understood to mean no more emissions than the Earth can naturally absorb.

Delegates in Paris are still debating several issues such as payment to countries affected by climate change while one of the world’s largest polluters, China, is thought to have rejected some proposals.

China’s President Xi Jinping spoke with U.S. President Barack Obama by telephone on Friday and said their countries, the top emitters of greenhouse gases, should step up efforts to reach a climate change deal, Chinese state media reported.

As World Wildlife Fund vice president of climate change Lou Leonard told me this week, “1.5 is an empty number if we don’t come back, if the next time we come back is in 2035”.

“We are nearly at the end of the road”, said Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister and president of the talks, who had stayed up into the early hours of Friday after a draft deal was published on Thursday night. There are also many unresolved disputes over losses and damages already accrued by climate change. Asked by the AP whether the draft would be the final one, he said only if “it’s more or less acceptable”.

The leaders of the world’s two biggest economies, and its two biggest polluters, discussed the crunch talks by telephone on Friday (local time), according to officials in Beijing and Washington.

It’s especially crucial for small islands, said Reilly, adding: “It’s hard to accept a target where some of the negotiating states won’t exist, and that’s what 2 degrees is”.

“There is still a lot of work ahead”, said Tasneem Essop, WWF’s head of delegation to the Paris talks.