The latest on the U.N. climate summit COP26 in Glasgow:
GLASGOW, Scotland — U.S. climate envoy John Kerry says American climate negotiators are having meaningful talks with their Russian and Chinese counterparts at the U.N. summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
That’s despite Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping skipping world leaders’ current rounds of climate talks, a decision that sparked complaints from U.S. President Joe Biden when he attended a few days ago.
Kerry told reporters he came late to a Friday press conference because Americans had been talking with Russian officials at the summit on efforts to reduce pollution from methane, a potent climate-damaging gas.
“We were talking about how we might deal with methane, possibly work together,” Kerry said of Russians.
“And we’re meeting with China here, and we’ve been talking for several days trying to figure out, is there common ground, as a way to try to move forward,” Kerry said. “There’s a sense of urgency.”
Biden last weekend blamed Xi’s and Putin’s not “showing up” for lack of more progress at Group of 20 climate discussions on the eve of the summit. China is the world’s largest current emitter of climate-wrecking fossil fuel emitters, the United States the second, and Russia in the top five.
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GLASGOW, Scotland — Hundreds of environmental activists have gathered in a Glasgow park to call on governments at the nearby U.N. climate talks to step up their action against global warming.
The activists, most of them young, carried banners at Friday’s rally with slogans such as “I have to clear up my mess, why don’t you clear up yours?” and “Stop climate crimes.”
The protest was part of a series of demonstrations being staged around the world Friday and Saturday to coincide with the Oct. 31-Nov. 12 U.N. climate change conference in Scotland.
Some at the Glasgow demonstration accused negotiators at the COP26 conference of “greenwashing” failures to curb greenhouse gas emissions and promoting policies that won’t do enough to prevent dangerous temperature rises in the coming decades.
“We are here as civil society to send them a message that ‘enough is enough’,” Valentina Ruiz, an 18-year-old student from Brazil, said.
Brianna Fruean, a 23-year-old activist from Samoa, said, “My biggest fear is losing my country.” Samao, a low-lying Pacific island nation, is particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels and cyclones,</…….