White House prepares for climate talks in Paris

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May says the fast-approaching Paris climate change summit will be the last opportunity for the world to take real steps to reverse the effects of global warming.

The Chinese foreign ministry announced on Wednesday that Xi will attend the Paris Climate Conference between November 29th and 30th, with an aim of reaching a deal on a post-2020 global action plan.

His remarks came as a White House official said US President Barack Obama would meet Xi and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the first day of the Paris talks on November 30. “What is clear is we need a robust deal on track to objective to limit to 2C… ambitious and fair in every area”.

Next week, the heads of 190 countries will gather at the United Nations’ climate change conference in Paris, which is knows as the Conference of the Parties (COP) 21.

India has over the past several months engaged with over 60 countries to share its perspective on climate change negotiations and its domestic action plans to curb the rate of its emissions growth.

“These two countries are two of our most important partners in dealing with global climate change”, Bodnar said noting Obama has had a number of engagements with the two leaders over the course of this year.

The world’s most industrialized countries will counter that countries like China, India, and Brazil now account for most of the world’s annual emissions of greenhouses gases.

China would play a “pivotal” role, bridging developing and developed countries on these issues, and a successful summit would be in China’s interest, he said. The second is India’s Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) have been well appreciated world over.

Obama will also meet with French President Francois Hollande, as well as with leaders of island nations such as the Seychelles and Marshall Islands that are threatened by rising sea levels.

As BG Group chief executive Helge Lund argued in a recent blog, natural gas “is not a silver bullet for all the global emissions targets, but increasing natural gas in the energy mix is unequivocally part of a carbon-reduction solution that also must include renewable and zero-carbon energy sources”.

Indian negotiators admitted that while countries like France were willing to talk on lifestyle change, a convergence on this highly contentious issue would be a tall order, given the lifestyle of citizens in the USA and Europe.

In addition they would face losing $1.7tn in their economies annually – $600bn more than if warming was contained at 2°C and four times more than rich countries gave in development aid past year.