Hamburg, July 8, – France’s President Emmanuel Macron announced Saturday a summit on climate change for December 12, two years after the landmark Paris accord.“On December 12… I will organise a new summit in order to take new action for the climate, including on the issue of financing,” he said after the G20 summit in Hamburg.
Climate change policy proved a sticking point at the G20 meeting, with the United States pressing for inclusion of wording about which other countries had reservations.
That passage read: “… the United States of America will endeavour to work closely with other partners to help their access to and use of fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently …”
The climate section took note of Trump’s decision last month to withdraw the United States from the landmark Paris climate accord aimed at combating climate change, and reaffirmed the commitment of the other 19 members to the agreement.
Merkel chose to host the summit in Hamburg, the port city where she was born, to send a signal about Germany’s openness to the world, including its tolerance of peaceful protests.
As the leaders met on Saturday, police helicopters hovered overhead. Overnight, police clashed with anti-capitalist protesters seeking to disrupt the summit.
In the early morning, heavily armed police commandos moved in after activists had spent much of Friday attempting to wrest control of the streets from more than 15,000 police, setting fires, looting and building barricades.
The summit is being held only a few hundred meters from one of Germany’s most potent symbols of left-wing resistance, a former theatre called the “Rote Flora” which was taken over by anti-capitalist squatters nearly three decades ago.
Police said 200 officers had been injured, 134 protesters temporarily detained and another 100 taken into custody. – Agencies
