Negotiators from nearly 200 countries worked through the night into Friday, the last formal day of climate change conference in Paris, with a goal to iron out the remaining issues hindering countries from committing to an ambitious goal of reducing emissions.
"It’s a very big problem that the emissions targets on the table will not keep us below 1.5 degrees of warming and this draft deal does absolutely nothing to change that," Martin Kaiser said Thursday.
The new version of the text states that parties to the agreement are "consistent with holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius."
Kaiser contends the draft deal "kicks that can down the road, saying ‘we’ll sort it in 10 or 15 years."
"That’s too late, they’re closing the door on our best chance to dodge dangerous warming…The negotiators have got twenty-four hours to change that simple fact," the activist remarked.
Kaiser further derided a single mention of the word "renewables" in relation to promoting access to electricity in African countries, as well as the wording of greenhouse gas emissions "neutrality" open to interpretation.
"Why can’t this conference just say it like it is, that we need to quit oil, coal and gas by 2050 at the latest? And why is there only one mention of the word renewables, and only in relation to Africa, when renewables will clearly come to dominate this century," he asked.
A Paris agreement analysis showed the draft text whittled down from 35,000 words to 18,800 ahead of the last day of talks.
Paris Draft Climate Deal Fails to Deliver Below-1.5 Degree Warming
11 December 2015
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The draft text of the Paris climate deal that was updated late Thursday in the final lap of the United Nations COP21 talks fails to ensure that the global warming would be kept below 1.5 degrees Celsius, a Greenpeace environmental group head of international climate politics said.
