PARIS - French President Nicolas Sarkozy says the fight against climate change needs massive new amounts of private investment and globally regulated "green'' markets to succeed.
Speaking a the climate talks currently underway in Paris, the French leader said about 90 per cent of the money for fighting global warming will come from the private sector over the long term.
But he says that mobilizing a few hundred million euros, or dollars, is not enough.
Instead, he says the international community must "massively redirect financial flows toward this new low-carbon economy.''
The U.S.-sponsored talks in Paris this week are aimed at ironing out disagreements between leading economies such as the United States, the European Union, China and India over how to reduce global warming.
They are meant to feed broader UN efforts to work out a follow-up plan to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which requires signatories to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases that contribute to global warming.
Sarkozy said the current climate negotiations should pay greater attention to the financial side of a post-Kyoto plan. The protocol expires in 2012.
U.S. officials agreed. "I commend the president for making this point,'' Alexander Karsner, an assistant U.S. energy secretary, told The Associated Press on the sidelines of the talks.
Such private financing is a "cornerstone'' of what the United States has been doing to fight global warming, he said.
The U.S. government has pushed private investment in so-called green technology, but has run into opposition from many countries for its calls for voluntary emission cuts by the private sector instead of government-mandated ones.
Sarkozy said the carbon credit market and other environmental financial tools currently used in Europe should be "globalized and regulated.''
Karsner, however, said he saw little need for a globalized carbon market.
Boyden Gray, special U.S. envoy for European affairs, said he did not foresee such a global system "any time soon.''
A carbon trading market -- or "cap-and-trade'' system -- works much as any commodities market does, except that traders earn their fees selling a tonne of carbon dioxide instead of corn or copper.
Countries that agree to reduction targets are given permits for allowable carbon dioxide emissions, and the permits are passed on to businesses. Companies can choose to cut their emissions by retrofitting a factory and selling their permits for a profit -- or continuing to pollute and buying additional units of carbon dioxide on the open market.
A UN climate panel of scientists released reports last year warning of fast-rising seas, extensive droughts and flooding, severe heat waves and other dire effects from global warming.
