Obama urges world to follow US lead on climate

President Barack Obama addresses the Climate Summit, Tuesday at United Nations headquarters.
President Barack Obama addresses the Climate Summit, Tuesday at United Nations headquarters.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - In the first international test for his climate-change strategy, President Barack Obama pressed world leaders Tuesday to follow the United States' lead on the issue, even as a one-day United Nations summit revealed the many obstacles that still stand in the way of wider agreements to reduce heat-trapping pollution.

"The United States has made ambitious investments in clean energy and ambitious reductions in our carbon emissions," Obama said. "Today I call on all countries to join us, not next year or the year after that, but right now. Because no nation can meet this global threat alone."

Obama was the headliner at a marathon session of world leaders who promised to spend billions of dollars to take better care of the planet.

But none of the pledges made at Tuesday's one-day meeting was binding. The summit, part of the annual U.N. General Assembly, was designed to lay the groundwork for a new global treaty to tackle climate change in December 2015. It also revealed the sharp differences that divide countries on matters such as deforestation, carbon pollution and methane leaks from oil and gas production:

• Brazil, home to the Amazon rainforest, said it would not sign a pledge to halt deforestation by 2030.

• The United States decided not to join 73 countries in supporting a price on carbon, which Congress has indicated it would reject.

• And minutes after Obama said "nobody gets a pass," Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli insisted the world treat developing nations, including China, differently than developed nations, allowing them to release more heat-trapping pollution. China, the No. 1 carbon-polluting nation, has signed a carbon-pricing agreement.

"Today we must set the world on a new course," United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said. "Climate change is the defining issue of our age. It is defining our present. Our response will define our future."

In some ways, the climate summit answered that call.

The European Union said its member nations by 2030 would cut greenhouse gases back to 40 percent below 1990 levels. The EU also called for using renewable energy for 27 percent of the bloc's power needs and increasing energy efficiency by 30 percent.

The United States will not release its new emissions targets until early next year.

Zhang said from 2005 to 2020 China will reduce its emissions per gross domestic product by 45 percent. But because economic growth in China has more than tripled since 2005, that means Chinese carbon pollution can continue to soar. Chinese officials said they did not know when they will stop increasing carbon emissions. Still, outside environmentalists hailed the Chinese pledge because it went beyond any of the country's previous statements.

More than 150 countries set the first-ever deadline to end deforestation by 2030, but the feasibility of that goal was eroded when Brazil said it would not join. Forests are important because they absorb the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. The United States, Canada and the entire European Union signed onto a declaration to halve forest loss by 2020 and eliminate deforestation entirely by 2030.