Obama Won't Offer Poor Nations Aid at U.N. Climate Summit

The United States won’t pledge any support to a near-empty fund for poor countries at a United Nations meeting this week on climate change, the organization’s social envoy on climate change said Friday.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has challenged 125 world leaders attending the Tuesday summit to make “bold pledges” — between $10 billion and $15 billion — to the fund designed to help poor countries deal with the dangers of a transforming climate.

The Guardian reports:

“We are putting a lot of pressure for them to do it at the summit on the 23rd,” the UN envoy and former Irish president, Mary Robinson, told the Guardian on the sidelines of a US Agency for International Development meeting. But she added: “I know the United States is not going to commit because I’ve asked.”

Obama put climate change at the top of his second term agenda, and the administration unveiled a host of new green measures in the run-up to next week’s meeting, including an initiative to cut the extremely potent greenhouse gas used as a coolant in refrigerators and air conditioners.

Obama’s speech to the summit will showcase those US actions, such as proposed new rules cutting carbon pollution from power plants.