Environment ministers sought to boost UN climate talks yesterday after the marathon meeting ran into turbulence, including a tough exchange between the US and China.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin said yesterday that Russian President Dmitry Medevdev would attend the talks next Thursday and Friday, joining other world leaders at the landmark conference.
Yu Qingtai (于慶泰), China's climate ambassador, said developed countries were to blame for today's greenhouse-gas problem and therefore had to pay to help poor countries switch to low-carbon technology and shore up their defenses against climate change.
“Provision of financial support to developing countries by developed countries is not an act of charity or philanthropy of rich people,” Yu told a press conference on Wednesday.
“It is the legal and historical responsibility of the developed countries,” Yu said.
However, the chief US negotiator at the climate talks, Todd Stern, rejected the notion of “reparations.”
“We absolutely recognize our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere, up there, but the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations, I just categorically reject that,” Stern said.
Developing nations “can't get a pass” from calls to burn less fossil fuels that cause climate change, he said.
Australian Minister for Climate Change and Water Penny Wong (黃英賢) said the negotiations had run into a “difficult start.”
“In many ways, it’s unsurprising, because it's a difficult negotiation,” she said late on Wednesday.
“I do have to say that some of the language that has been reported is disappointing, some of it's unhelpful. If we are going to make this work, we have to move away from blame-shifting and finger-pointing,” Wong said.
Meanwhile, EU leaders were meeting in Brussels yesterday for a two-day summit where they were expected to debate the option of deepening a unilateral cut of 20 percent to 30 percent if they found a similar effort among other industrialized countries.
European leaders hoped to put together a multibillion-euro fund to help developing nations tackle global warming. But with many nations reluctant to dip into depleted national coffers, richer Western European countries will be expected to put up most of the 6 billion euros (US$9 billion) sought over the next three years.
If the pledges for the money come in during the EU summit in Brussels, Europe hopes it will spur the rest of the developed world to chip in too.
If not, the bloc’s much-touted leading role in the battle against climate change will take a knock.
“It’s a question of instant money, within the context of an economic crisis and squeezed budgets,” as one European diplomat put it.
“The Swedish EU presidency wants a precise figure, and it would be of the order of 2 billion euros per year” from Europe, another diplomatic source said, ahead of the two-day summit.
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