PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday told dozens of world leaders and company bosses gathered at a climate summit in Paris that “we are losing the battle” against climate change.
“We’re not moving quick enough. We all need to act,” Macron said, seeking to breath new life into efforts to combat global warming after President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of an international accord brokered in the French capital two years ago.
Without trillions of dollars invested in clean energy technology, the Paris Agreement’s goal to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels will remain a pipe dream, participants warned.
“While the challenge is great, we must do everything in our power to meet it. We know it is the difference between life and death for millions of vulnerable people around the world,” said Frank Bainimarama, the prime minister of Fiji who presided over UN climate talks in Bonn last month.
“There are trillions of dollars sitting in private investment institutions… and they are all looking for opportunities to earn a return. We must unlock that finance,” he told delegates.
French President Emmanuel Macron gathered some 60 world leaders, partly in response to US President Donald Trump’s announcement in June that he would pull America out of the Paris pact which had taken nearly 200 nations more than two decades to negotiate.
About 200 protesters gathered in the Paris streets, meanwhile, demanding that France pays “not a single euro more for fossil energy”.
Mankind’s voracious burning of oil, coal and natural gas is blamed for planet-warming greenhouse gases that have caused the average global temperature to rise by about 1 C to date.
