The US sees a diminished role for the UN in trying to stop global warming after the “chaotic” Copenhagen climate change summit, a US official said on Wednesday.
US Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change Jonathan Pershing, who helped lead talks at Copenhagen, instead sketched out a future path for negotiations dominated by the world’s largest polluters such as China, the US, India, Brazil and South Africa, which signed up to a deal in the final hours of the summit. That would represent a realignment of the way the international community has dealt with climate change over the last two decades.
“It is impossible to imagine a global agreement in place that essentially doesn’t have a global buy-in,” he said, in a reference to the UN.
However, he added that “it is also impossible to imagine a negotiation of such global complexity.”
Pershing said the flaws in the UN process, which demands consensus among the international community, were exposed at Copenhagen.
“The meeting itself was at best chaotic,” he said, in a talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “We met mostly overnight. It seemed like we didn’t sleep for two weeks. It seemed a funny way to do things, and it showed.”
The lack of confidence in the UN extends to the US$30 billion global fund, which will be mobilized over the next three years to help poor countries adapt to climate change.
“I am not sure that any of us are particularly confident that the UN managing the near-term financing is the right way to go,” he said.
Pershing did not exclude the UN from future negotiations, but he repeatedly credited the group of leading economies headed by the US for moving forward on the talks.
He suggested the larger forum offered by the UN was instead important for countries such as Cuba or the small islands that risk annihilation by climate change to air their grievances.
The first test of the accord agreed by the US, China, India, South Africa and Brazil arrives on Jan. 31, the deadline for countries to commit officially to actions to halt global warming. Here, too, Pershing indicated that the focus would be far narrower in scope than the UN’s all-inclusive approach.
“We expect that there will be significant actions recorded by major countries,” he said. “We are not really worried what Chad does. We are not really worried about what Haiti says it is going to do about greenhouse gas emissions. We just hope they recover from the earthquake.”
Key groups of developing countries are to meet this month to try to explore ways to get to agree a binding agreement.
Under UN laws, consensus is required for a binding agreement. There is growing confusion over the legal standing of the agreement reached in Copenhagen and many countries may not be in a position to sign up by Jan. 31 because they have yet to consult their parliaments.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
TIGHTENING: Zhu Hengpeng, who worked for an influential think tank, has reportedly not been seen in public since making disparaging remarks on WeChat A leading Chinese economist at a government think tank has reportedly disappeared after being disciplined for criticizing Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in a private chat group. Zhu Hengpeng (朱恆鵬), 55, is believed to have made disparaging remarks about China’s economy, and potentially about the Chinese leader specifically, in a private WeChat group. Zhu was subsequently detained in April and put under investigation, the Wall Street Journal reported. Zhu worked for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) for more than 20 years, most recently as the Institute of Economics deputy director and director of the Public Policy Research Center. He
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
CHINESE ICBM: The missile landed near the EEZ of French Polynesia, much to the surprise and concern of the president, who sent a letter of protest to Beijing Fijian President Ratu Wiliame Katonivere called for “respect for our region” and a stop to missile tests in the Pacific Ocean, after China launched an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). In a speech to the UN General Assembly in New York on Thursday, Katonivere recalled the Pacific Ocean’s history as a nuclear weapons testing ground, and noted Wednesday’s rare launch by China of an ICBM. “There was a unilateral test firing of a ballistic missile into the Pacific Ocean. We urge respect for our region and call for cessation of such action,” he said. The ICBM, carrying a dummy warhead, was launched by the
RSS