Climate change: Stalemate at UN talks as splits re-appear

Delegates at the climate talks in Madrid are concerned that divisions between rich and poor are re-emerging 

UN climate talks in Madrid enter their final scheduled day with divisions emerging between major emitting countries and small island states.

Negotiators are attempting to agree a deal in the Spanish capital that would see countries commit to make new climate pledges by the end of 2020.

But serious disagreements have emerged over how much carbon-cutting the major emitters should undertake.

The talks have also become bogged down in rows over key technical issues.

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Negotiators arrived in Madrid two weeks ago with the words of the UN secretary general ringing in their ears - António Guterres told delegates that "the point of no return is no longer over the horizon".

Protests led by young delegates saw up to 200 protestors ejected from the talks

Despite his pleas, the conference has become enmeshed in deep, technical arguments about a number of issues including the role of carbon markets and the financing of loss and damage caused by rising temperatures.

The key question of raising ambition has also been to the forefront of the discussions.

Responding to the messages from science and from school strikers, the countries running this COP are keen to have a final decision here that would see countries put new, ambitious plans to cut carbon on the table.

According to the UN, 84 countries have promised to enhance their national plans by the end of next year. Some 73 have said they will set a long-term target of net zero by the middle of the century.

In a rare move, negotiators from the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) pointed the finger of blame at countries including Australia, the United States, Canada, Russia, India, China and Brazil.

They had failed to submit revised plans that would help the world keep the rise in global temperatures under 1.5C this century.

As well as naming names, AOSIS members were angry at the pressure being put on the island nations to compromise on key questions.

"We are appalled at the state of negotiations - at this stage we are being cornered, we fear having to concede on too many issues that would undermine the very integrity of the Paris agreement," said Carlos Fuller, AOSIS chief negotiator.

"What's before us is a level of compromise so profound that it underscores a lack of ambition, seriousness about the climate emergency and the urgent need to secure the fate of our islands."

Reinforcing the sense of division, India, supported by China, Saudi Arabia and Brazil, is taking a hard line on the promises made by richer countries in previous agreements before the Paris pact was signed in 2015.

They are insisting that the pledges to cut carbon in the years up to 2020 be examined and if the countries haven't met their targets, these should be carried over to the post-2020 era.

Signed in 2015, the Paris climate pact saw every country, India included, sign up to take actions.

This was a key concession to the richer nations who insisted that the deal would only work if everyone pledged to cut carbon, unlike previous agreements in which only the better off had to limit their CO2.

India now wants to see evidence that in the years up to 2020, the developed world has lived up to past promises.

"The Paris agreement talks about the leadership of the developed countries, it talks about the peaking of greenhouse gases earlier in these countries, so we need to see these things," said Ravi Shankar Prasad, India's chief negotiator.

"You have to honour what you agreed."

The developed world see the Indian stance as a tactic, where they are trying to go back to the way things were before Paris, with the richer countries doing the most of the heavy lifting while China, India and others do less.

Some politicians in attendance at this meeting believe there's too much self interest and not enough countries looking at the bigger picture.

Some visitors have other things to do at the COP 

"Frankly, I'm tired of hearing major emitters excuse inaction in cutting their own emissions on the basis they are 'just a fraction' of the world's total," said the prime minister of Fiji, Frank Bainimarama.

"The truth is, in a family of nearly 200 nations, collective efforts are key. We all must take responsibility for ourselves, and we all must play our part to achieve net zero.

"As I like to say, we're all in the same canoe. But currently, that canoe is taking on water with nearly 200 holes - and there are too few of us trying to patch them," Mr Bainimarama said.

Britain's Johnson backs digital tax despite Trump's ire

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he would press ahead with new taxes on U.S internet giants like Facebook and Google, putting him at odds with U.S. President Trump who has threatened retaliation against France over its digital tax plans.

"On the digital services tax, I do think we need to look at the operation of the big digital companies and the huge revenues they have in this country and the amount of tax that they pay," Johnson said on Tuesday, according to a BBC report.

"We need to sort that out. They need to make a fairer contribution."

Johnson's Conservative Party has committed to implementing a digital service tax on the revenue of companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon in 

its blueprint for government if it wins this month's national election.

Under the plan, tech companies that generate at least 500 million pounds($640 million) a year in global revenue will pay a levy of 2% of the money they make from UK users from April 2020.

France's digital service tax, which has been set at a rate of 3% of revenue derived from French users backdated to early 2019, has raised the ire of Trump.

The United States said on Monday said it could slap punitive duties of up to 100% on $2.4 billion in imports from France of Champagne, handbags, cheese and other products.

"We've taxed wine and we have other taxes scheduled," Trump told reporters, sitting alongside French President Emmanuel Macron in London ahead of a NATO summit, on Tuesday.

"We'd rather not do that, but that's the way it would work. So it's either going to work out, or we'll work out some mutually beneficial tax." ($1 = 0.7794 pounds)

© Thomson Reuters U.S. President Donald Trump holds a bilateral meeting with British Prime Minister                                                                                   Boris Johnson on the sidelines of the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York City                                                                                                        , New York, U.S., September 24, 2019.

(Reporting by Paul Sandle; editing by Guy Faulconbridge

The blast that killed 5 Russian engineers may have been caused by another failed test of Putin's doomsday missile

The blast that killed 5 Russian engineers may have been caused by another failed test of Putin's doomsday missile 

A deadly explosion at a missile test site last week may have been caused by a failed test of a nuclear-powered cruise missile, although Russia has yet to say what its engineers were working on at the time of the blast.

Five Russian nuclear scientists were buried Monday after they were killed in an explosion last week. Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation, Russia's state nuclear agency, said they were testing a nuclear-powered engine at the time the blast occurred, BBC reports.

"The rocket tests were carried out on the offshore platform," Rosatom reportedly said in a statement over the weekend. "After the tests were completed, the rocket fuel ignited, followed by detonation. After the explosion, several employees were thrown into the sea."

Rosatom did not clarify what exactly went wrong during testing, explaining only that "there was a confluence of factors, which often happens when testing new technologies."

Read more: Russia gave posthumous awards to 5 nuclear experts who died in a mysterious explosion last week

The Russian defense ministry, by way of Russian state media, said earlier that only two people were killed when a liquid-propellant rocket engine blew up. The story has changed as the death toll has risen, and as some observers spotted a spike in radiation levels; it remains unclear if five is the total death toll from the blast.

The scientists and engineers "tragically died while testing a new special device," Alexei Likhachev, the head of Rosatom, said at the funeral Monday.

© RU-RTR Russian Television via AP The men were buried in Sarov, a city known for nuclear research, Bloomberg reports, explaining that experts suspect that what blew up might have been a compact nuclear reactor. Three other individuals were injured by the explosion at Russia's Nyonoksa test range.

"The best thing for their memory will be our further work on the new weapons," Likhachev stated at Monday's funeral. "We are fulfilling the task of the motherland. Its security will be reliably ensured."

US intelligence officials, The New York Times reports, believe that last week's explosion involved a prototype of the 9M730 Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile, a kind of doomsday missile that NATO refers to as SSC-X-9 Skyfall. Several experts have arrived at the same conclusion.

In March 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin boasted that the missile was "invincible," asserting that the weapon has "an unlimited range, unpredictable trajectory and ability to bypass interception." But, so far, Russia has struggled to get the weapon to fly.

No country has ever fielded a nuclear-powered cruise missile, although the US briefly flirted with the idea decades ago. 

"Was this stupid missile worth getting these young men killed?" Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program for the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, rhetorically asked Monday in a Foreign Policy article on the incident. 

In the article, he concludes that the weapon tested last week was likely the Burevestnik and argues that an escalating arms race between the US and Russia could lead to more nuclear accidents. 

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