Michal Kurtyka leapt over his desk in joy as the UN conference he chaired ended in a breakthrough with China Janek Skarzynski/AFP/GettyChina has agreed to take on the same responsibility for curbing greenhouse gas emissions as rich countries in a breakthrough at the end of a fractious UN climate summit in Poland. The concession by the world’s largest polluter resolved more than two weeks of deadlock after the meeting of 193 nations threatened at several points to dissolve into chaos. The talks, which took place at Katowice in the coal-mining region of Silesia, were intended to hammer out a detailed plan for keeping average global temperatures less than 1.5C above where they had been before the industrial revolution. China is the world’s biggest polluter by a distance ReutersThe prognosis for the conference had been bleak. President Trump announced last year that he would pull the US out of the negotiations in 2020, tweeting that the…

Source: The Times December 16, 2018 18:00 UTC