News Daily Spot: Climate summit is not a fanfare tells France to United States

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Climate summit is not a fanfare tells France to United States

Any global agreement on climate change to be reached in Paris next month will be legally binding and will have a concrete impact, the French Foreign Minister, in response to comments of the United States called into question the status of said Thursday agreement.

The Secretary of State, John Kerry, was quoted as telling the Financial Times on Wednesday that the December agreement "definitely will not be a treaty," Reuters reported.

His French counterpart Laurent Fabius said on Thursday that, unlike in previous negotiations, the Paris talks were not only "fanfare" and maybe Kerry was "confused".

"The jurists discuss the legal nature of the agreement, on whether it should be called international treaty or agreement," Fabius told reporters.

"But obviously the fact that certain provisions should be practical and legally binding effect, so do not confuse things, which perhaps is what has made Mr. Kerry" Fabius, who spoke to Kerry said Wednesday.



Officials from 200 nations will meet from November 30 to December 11 to try to recover from the failure of the latest climate talks in 2009 in Copenhagen and seal a definitive agreement to limit global warming.

While the EU and developing countries there is a call for internationally binding text, others, like the United States, just want a national compliance obligation.

Kerry said the text would not establish "legally binding reduction targets like Kyoto."

The Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, imposed on all signatory countries the obligation to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide by at least 5 percent between 2008 and 2012 compared to 1990, a treaty that Washington refused to sign.

"There is a political debate. It's a real deal with facts," Fabius, who acknowledged, however, that the United States should consider internal political sensitivities said.

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