Race on to seal global climate deal

Obama: Global warming economic, security threat

Negotiators tasked with saving Earth’s climate system embarked on Tuesday on an 11-day race to overcome decades-long disputes as experts pointed to a towering threat from coal.

A day after world leaders pledged to tame global warming, bureaucrats from 195 nations scrambled to shape a labyrinthine 54-page text into a blueprint that can be approved by December 11.

US President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that global warming posed economic and security risks that had to be tackled immediately, and insisted the climate problem could be solved.

If global warming continues, “then before long we are going to have to devote more and more of our economic and military resources not to growing opportunity for our people but to adapting to the various consequences of a changing planet,” Mr Obama said.

“Climate change is a massive problem, it’s a generational problem,” Mr Obama said on the sidelines of the UN conference.

The goal — endorsed ringingly by around 150 heads of state and government at the start of the talks on Monday — is to commit every nation to a post-2020 pact to roll back emissions of carbon gases.

Scientists have long warned that time is short for weaning humanity off its dependence on burning fossil fuels, the backbone of the world’s energy supply and biggest source of these heat-trapping emissions.

But, heaping pressure on negotiators, researchers for the respected group Climate Action Tracker said on Tuesday the clock was now ticking even faster than before.

If planned new coal-fired plants come online, they said, the added emissions would wreck hopes of meeting the UN target of curbing warming to two degrees Celsius from pre-Industrial Revolution levels.

“There is a solution to this issue of too many coal plants on the books: cancel them,” said Pieter Van Breevoort of Ecofys, an energy research organisation which is part of Climate Action Tracker.

“Renewable energy and stricter pollution standards are making coal plants obsolete around the world, and the earlier a coal plant is taken out of the planning process, the less it will cost.”

The talks, taking place a heavily secured conference centre at Le Bourget on the northern outskirts of Paris, headed into the detail phase after the verbal flourishes of Monday, when around 150 leaders gathered for the biggest one-day summit in UN history.

“Never have the stakes of an international meeting been so high, because it concerns the future of the planet, the future of life,” French President Francois Hollande said. “The hope of all of humanity rests on all of your shoulders.”

Mr Obama on Tuesday met with the heads of small-island states, who are among the nations most at threat from climate change.

“Some of their nations could disappear entirely and as weather patterns change,” said Mr Obama.

“We might deal with tens of millions of climate refugees in the Asia Pacific region.”