Kerry: No Binding Agreement at COP 21; Hollande Throws a Fit

US Secretary of State John Kerry told the Financial Times on Wednesday in regard to the COP 21 Global Warming Conference in Paris: “It’s definitively not going to be a treaty… They’re not going to be legally binding reduction targets like Kyoto or something.”

French President Hollande went berzerk. “If the agreement is not legally binding, there will be no agreement,” he told the international press in Malta on the sidelines of the EU-Africa migration conference. “I know how difficult it is,” Hollande said, in reference to the opposition to a binding agreement in the US Congress. “But we must give the Paris agreement, if there is one, a binding character in the sense that the commitments that are made must be kept and respected.”

The Guardian reported that a global poll last week found that residents of China and the US were among the least concerned about climate change.

The spokesman for the EU Climate Commission, Miquel Arias Canete, said in response to Kerry’s comment, “The Paris agreement must be an international legally binding agreement.” French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius had said it was obvious that any agreement in Paris would contain legally binding elements, and suggested that Kerry was “confused” about the point.

It is not just the US Congress, of course, but India and China, which will not submit to binding suicide in Paris, as they refused to do in Copenhagen in 2009.

There is no comment as yet from the White House.