UN climate chief’s blunt message: Fewer loopholes, way more cash to really halt climate change

By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer

The United Nations’ climate chief says to keep Earth from overheating too much, the nations of the world need to put fewer loopholes in climate agreements and far more money — trillions of dollars a year — into financial help for poor nations. In an unusual and blunt Friday lecture at a university in Azerbaijan, the nation that will host international climate negotiations late this year, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell calls the gains made in the past not near enough. He says without the proper amount of cash those could “quickly fizzle away into more empty promises.”