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At Davos, push for clean energy as climate weapon

Wednesday - 1/22/2014, 4:50pm  ET

Associated Press

DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) -- Leaders gathered in the Swiss ski resort of Davos are pushing for nations worldwide to shift to cleaner energy sources as the best way to contain global warming and re-energize the global economy.


"It is important that we get the treaty because the signal to the markets, the signal to the global economy, needs to be stronger than it is right now," she said in an Associated Press interview on Wednesday.


Figueres says she sees "momentum growing toward this" as countries like China reduce coal use to clear polluted skies and Indonesia plants more trees to protect water resources, seeing that it's in their national interest to develop more sustainably.

Scientists say man-made climate change is likely to worsen starvation, poverty, lack of water, flooding, heat waves, droughts and diseases, raising the specter of more conflict and war, unless drastic action is taken to lower emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of coal, oil and gas from their current trajectories.



South Korea's President Park Geun-hye said climate change is a problem that will take creativity to overcome.

"Climate change and environmental challenges are global in nature. As such the world must act as one in tackling them," she said.


Indian Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said he couldn't say whether his country would sign on to a treaty at this point. Developing economies can't be asked to shoulder most of the burden, he told reporters in Davos, and the enormous amount of financial support that rich industrialized nations promised in aid for adapting to a warmer world "is simply not forthcoming."

Al Gore was the headliner at a private session on how leaders can help prevent -- and better communicate -- catastrophic effects on public health, anti-poverty efforts, clean water and energy supplies from a rise in global temperatures above 4 degrees F.

"The climate conversation has to be won by those who are willing to speak up," he told them. "It is a race against time, but we are going to win."


"There's a rising recognition that we simply have to find a way to break through," Jim Leape, director general of Geneva-based WWF International, told AP. "The big governments each need to renew their commitment."
