Paris climate talks are extended into Saturday
PARIS — The international conference seeking a historic accord for combating global warming extended its talks at least one more day after an all-night negotiating session failed to reach an agreement by Friday's deadline.
Laurent Fabius, France’s foreign minister and president of the 195-nation summit, suspended talks at around 6:30 a.m. and admitted they would continue into Saturday or beyond. “We’re near the end of the road but we’re not there yet,” Fabius said.
Minister-level delegates are working to hammer out the most ambitious climate agreement ever, the first to require some level of agreement from every nation. The goal is to keep global temperatures in the future from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahernheit, above pre-industrial levels, though some participants are arguing for a more stringent curb.
The last draft text, released Thursday, showed the number of sticking points dramatically reduced, though environmentalists said the growing consensus is coming at the expense of strong enforcement language removed from the text.
“Without some dramatic last-minute developments, this text risks becoming a license for countries to pollute,” said Asad Rehman from Friends of the Earth International.
In a brief statement Friday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon said the key differences were mostly about how to divide costs for shifting to renewable energy, reducing worldwide emissions and helping poor countries. Ban planned to met with key ministers, including U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry,to push the process forward.
Many cash-strapped developing countries complain that steps required to meet tougher curbs on man-made greenhouse gases believed responsible for global warming — including less use of fossil fuels such as coal and oil —will slow their economic growth and be costly.
Kerry told reporters the all-night session made “a lot of progress” and he expressed confidence that “an ambitious” agreement would be reached.
Fabius said a few more hours of closed-door talks into Saturday morning would be enough to produce a deal countries could adopt.
Other key observers suspected it could stretch out even longer. “We could be at the start of a long weekend,” said veteran climate activist Harjeet Singh of ActionAid International.
Missing deadlines is typical for multinational climate talks. In 20 previous summits, the last one to end on the schedule occurred nine years ago. Several have lasted a day or more beyond their scheduled end, and one in 2000 was suspended when an agreement could not be reached. It didn’t officially end until eight months later.
None of those summits, however, had ambitions as high as these talks. If successful, they will transform the world economy into one that runs on low-polluting renewable energy, said Christiana Figueres, the U.N.’s top climate change official.