White House officials say Obama is determined to take lead on climate change during talks set to begin on Monday with bilateral meeting with China

Lessons from past failures will help push nations towards a robust climate change agreement that will push down greenhouse gas emissions, the White House has predicted.



The US has promised to take a leadership role during next week’s talks in Paris, with Barack Obama arriving on Sunday night for a number of high-level meetings designed to spur early momentum.

The UN talks start on Monday and will run until 11 December, with 138 heads of state expected to attend.

Obama will hold a bilateral meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping on Monday morning that will send a “strong message to the world of their shared commitment to combat climate change and see a strong agreement reached”, according to Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications at the White House.

Following the meeting between the world’s two largest emitters of greenhouse gases, the US president will have one-on-one dialogues with French president François Hollande and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi.

The following day, Obama will meet with leaders of low-lying island nations, such as the Marshall Islands and Kiribati, that are particularly vulnerable to climate change and are keen to see wealthy nations part with the $100bn in climate finance promised at the 2009 Copenhagen talks. He will then return to the US.

White House officials said that the president was determined to show leadership on the issue of climate change as it posed a “clear and present threat” to US national security and an “existential challenge” to developing nations that will bear the brunt of extreme weather events and food insecurity caused by warming temperatures.

Rhodes said the Paris talks will be approached differently to Copenhagen, which is widely viewed as a hastily patched-together failure.

“By the time [Obama arrived in Copenhagen] things had already unravelled and then had to be put back together,” he said. “The goal here is to give a push with heads of state at the beginning of the process and then allow [secretary of state John] Kerry and others to finalise the details.”

The White House anticipates the talks will help meet an internationally agreed target of keeping global warming below a 2C compared with pre-industrial times, even though current emissions reduction pledges amount to warming of around 2.7C. Periodic reviews of emissions cuts beyond Paris will help meet this goal, officials said.

“The stars are more aligned to reach agreement than I have ever seen before,” said Todd Stern, the US chief negotiator. “There is no comparison between Paris and Copenhagen in 2009. We have this opportunity, this moment. Countries are going to have to be willing to depart from some of their fixed positions to seek common good. We can get this done. We will get his done.”

Stern, the US’s long-standing special envoy on climate change, said that he envisaged “normal” problems over striking a deal in Paris that was fair to all countries and which reflected different countries’ abilities to make emissions cuts.

“We have a situation where 60-65% of emissions come from developing countries,” he said. “That’s a good thing. It means that developing countries are developing. But you cannot solve climate change on the back of the 35%.

“You cannot ask countries to act in ways that are inconsistent with their growth imperatives. Countries need to act in a way that they think they can manage. We can’t just say to developed countries that ‘this is your burden’.”

White House officials said they are consulting members of the Republican-controlled US Congress over the talks but would not be drawn on whether the Paris agreement will need approval from the Senate, as treaties normally do.

Kerry has said that the mix of binding and non-binding elements of the deal – emissions cuts will require “transparency and accountability” but will not be legally binding according to the White House – means it doesn’t fit the standard definition of a treaty.

In a bid to generate further momentum for the Paris talks, the White House announced on Monday that federal agencies will further slash their own output of greenhouse gases. The US government, one of the largest emitters in the country, now has an emissions reduction target of 41.8% from 2008 levels by 2025.

This target, a slight upgrade on targets first announced in March, will encompass the 360,000 buildings and 650,000 fleet vehicles operated by US government agencies. Nasa will invest in renewable energy and will cut energy consumption at the Johnson Space Center in Houston by 17% through a new heat and power system. Other actions include a cut in petrol use by the Department of Homeland Security and an expanded solar energy array for the Department of Energy.

However, Obama’s Republican opponents in Congress continue to oppose key elements of the US’s plan to tackle climate change, as well as providing climate finance for developing countries.

A senior Republican figure has also launched a campaign against the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the federal agency that tracks the weather and climate. Lamar Smith, chairman of the House science committee, has demanded internal correspondence from Noaa in a bid to reveal what he believes is a conspiracy to alter climate data to support Obama’s agenda.

Smith has focused upon a study published in the journal Science, authored by Noaa scientists, that challenges the theory among some climate science sceptics that there has been a “pause” in the rise in global temperatures.

Kathryn Sullivan, Noaa’s administrator, has refused to hand over the correspondence and has written to Smith to state: “I have not or will not allow anyone to manipulate the science or coerce the scientists who work for me.”

