Free Republic

Brazil’s environment minister trolled the recent climate talks in a tweet that may have some activists seeing red. Ricardo Salles — a participant in the longest U.N. climate talks on record, which came to a disappointing end Sunday — posted an image of a meat platter in an apparent dig at environmentalists. “To offset our emissions at COP, a veggie lunch!” Salles posted in reference to the talks, which his boss, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, also has criticized. “Rich countries do not want to open their carbon credit markets,” Salles said in an earlier tweet. “They demand measurements and point...

A handful of major states resisted pressure on Dec. 15 to ramp up efforts to combat global warming as a U.N. climate summit came to a delayed close. The summit talks in Madrid, dubbed COP25, were viewed as a test of governments’ collective will for more aggressive cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. But the conference, in its concluding draft, endorsed only a modest declaration on the “urgent need” to close the gap between existing emissions pledges and the temperature goals of the 2015 Paris climate pact. Brazil, China, Australia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States had led resistance to bolder...

European lawmakers have voted to declare an EU-wide climate emergency, in a symbolic move aimed at increasing pressure on the incoming European Commission to take a stronger stance on climate change. The climate declaration was passed on Thursday in Strasbourg during a European Parliament (EP) debate on the upcoming United Nations’ COP25 climate summit that kicks off December 2 in Madrid. In a statement on Twitter after the vote, EU lawmakers urged the European Commission “to fully ensure all relevant legislative and budgetary proposals are fully aligned” with the 1.5-degree-Celsius target limit on global warming. The resolution calls on the...