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.
Also See: Islanders blocked in bid for tough climate action
Also See: ‘Plan B’ an option if climate diplomacy fails in Copenhagen
NATIONAL SECURITY: The Chinese influencer shared multiple videos on social media in which she claimed Taiwan is a part of China and supported its annexation Freedom of speech does not allow comments by Chinese residents in Taiwan that compromise national security or social stability, the nation’s top officials said yesterday, after the National Immigration Agency (NIA) revoked the residency permit of a Chinese influencer who published videos advocating China annexing Taiwan by force. Taiwan welcomes all foreigners to settle here and make families so long as they “love the land and people of Taiwan,” Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) told lawmakers during a plenary session at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei. The public power of the government must be asserted when necessary and the Ministry of
Proposed amendments would forbid the use of all personal electronic devices during school hours in high schools and below, starting from the next school year in August, the Ministry of Education said on Monday. The Regulations on the Use of Mobile Devices at Educational Facilities up to High Schools (高級中等以下學校校園行動載具使用原則) state that mobile devices — defined as mobile phones, laptops, tablets, smartwatches or other wearables — should be turned off at school. The changes would stipulate that use of such devices during class is forbidden, and the devices should be handed to a teacher or the school for safekeeping. The amendments also say
EMBRACING TAIWAN: US lawmakers have introduced an act aiming to replace the use of ‘Chinese Taipei’ with ‘Taiwan’ across all Washington’s federal agencies A group of US House of Representatives lawmakers has introduced legislation to replace the term “Chinese Taipei” with “Taiwan” across all federal agencies. US Representative Byron Donalds announced the introduction of the “America supports Taiwan act,” which would mandate federal agencies adopt “Taiwan” in place of “Chinese Taipei,” a news release on his page on the US House of Representatives’ Web site said. US representatives Mike Collins, Barry Moore and Tom Tiffany are cosponsors of the legislation, US political newspaper The Hill reported yesterday. “The legislation is a push to normalize the position of Taiwan as an autonomous country, although the official US
CHANGE OF TONE: G7 foreign ministers dropped past reassurances that there is no change in the position of the G7 members on Taiwan, including ‘one China’ policies G7 foreign ministers on Friday took a tough stance on China, stepping up their language on Taiwan and omitting some conciliatory references from past statements, including to “one China” policies. A statement by ministers meeting in Canada mirrored last month’s Japan-US statement in condemning “coercion” toward Taiwan. Compared with a G7 foreign ministers’ statement in November last year, the statement added members’ concerns over China’s nuclear buildup, although it omitted references to their concerns about Beijing’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong. Also missing were references stressing the desire for “constructive and stable relations with China” and
RSS