UN climate summit stalls as US backs dispute over science report

Source: The Hill

The United Nations climate summit in Poland stalled over the weekend as the U.S. joined Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in declining to "welcome" a landmark study on worldwide climate change.

All four oil-producing nations are calling for the report to be "noted" rather than "welcomed," a semantic difference that the State Department said draws a line between a U.S. acknowledgement and a full-out endorsement, The Associated Press reported.

"The United States was willing to note the report and express appreciation to the scientists who developed it, but not to welcome it, as that would denote endorsement of the report,” the State Department said in a statement, according to the AP.

The report, released in October by the the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warns that the world might be on a path toward catastrophic climate change if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t cut dramatically by 2030.

Read more: https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/420484-un-climate-summit-stalls-as-us-backs-dispute-over-science-report