Count Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper out for a United Nations climate summit later this month.
Harper’s office said he would skip the Sept. 23 event, but will attend a dinner with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to discuss climate issues.
Harper is the latest high-profile world leader to bow out of the New York summit — Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who represent the top and third-largest greenhouse gas emitters in the world, will reportedly miss the event as well. A majority of scientists say that greenhouse gases are causing global warming.
President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron, however, will be at the summit, along with 125 other heads of state. Obama is trying to leverage domestic proposals to slash carbon emissions from the electricity sector 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 to get other countries to make similar pledges to address climate change.
The meeting is viewed as a prelude to international negotiations next year in Paris, where nations will seek to secure enough greenhouse gas-cutting commitments by 2020 to avoid a 2 degrees Celsius global temperatures rise by century’s end.
