PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron will meet with world leaders on Tuesday, two years to the day since 195 nations adopted the climate-rescue Paris Agreement — this time to talk about money.

Without trillions of dollars of investment in clean energy, the pact’s goal to keep global warming below 2˚ Celsius (3.6˚ Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels will remain a pipedream, observers and participants warned on the eve of the Paris summit.

Political action “will not be enough if we do not update and reset the global finance architecture and make all development low-emission, resilient, and sustainable,” UN climate chief Patricia Espinosa said.

“We see some movement… but climate consideration must now be part of all private sector decisions,” she said.

After the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015 to cheers and champagne, helped over the finish line by then US president Barack Obama, his successor Donald J. Trump has cast a long shadow over the process, withdrawing political support and finance.

Money has long been a sore point in the UN climate process, with developing nations insisting on financial assistance to help them make the costly move to less-polluting energy sources, and to shore up defenses against climate change-induced superstorms, mega-droughts and land-gobbling sea level rise.

Mr. Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” announced in June that the United States would pull out of the Paris pact, which had taken nearly 200 nations more than two decades to negotiate.

The US is the only country to reject the agreement.

Mr. Trump has also asked Congress to slash the climate research budgets of federal agencies — threatening a loss of billions of dollars and thousands of jobs.

The Trump administration would also not fulfill US climate finance commitments, including an outstanding $2 billion out of $3 billion it had pledged towards the Green Climate Fund.

“The missing piece of the jigsaw is the funding to help the world’s poorer countries access clean energy so they don’t follow the fossil fuel-powered path of the rich world,” said Mohamed Adow of Christian Aid, which represents poor country interests at the UN climate forum.

“This is the missing piece that the One Planet Summit needs to begin to put into place.”

In the absence of former climate champion Mr. Obama, American businesses, regions and local government leaders have reiterated their commitment to decarbonization.

“It doesn’t matter that Donald Trump backed out of the Paris Agreement, because the private sector didn’t drop out, the public sector didn’t drop out, universities didn’t drop out, no one dropped out,” former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, now the face of the R20 network of sub-national climate actors, said in Paris.

“Don’t worry about any of that, we are the subnational level, we’re going to pick up the slack,” he said.

On the eve of the summit, the heads of many of world’s space agencies proposed the creation of a space climate observatory to pool acquired data to share with scientists around the globe, according to a declaration they adopted at their meeting in Paris.

Among the leaders in attendance at Tuesday’s summit will be UN chief Antonio Guterres, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, Mexico’s Enrique Peña Nieto, Theresa May of Britain, Spain’s Mariano Rajoy, and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Mr. Trump was not invited to Tuesday’s gathering, and the US — the world’s biggest historical emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gases — will be represented by an embassy official.

Also absent will be the leaders of major polluters China, India, Brazil, Russia and Canada, as well as Germany’s Angela Merkel among EU members.

Rich nations pledged in 2009 to muster $100 billion per year in climate finance for developing nations from 2020.

On 2015 trends, total public financing would reach about $67 billion by that date, according to a report of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The International Energy Agency estimates that investments of some $3.5 trillion per year in the energy sector will be needed to 2050 to stay under the 2˚ C limit — double current spending. — AFP

HONG KONG — A British banker jailed for life for the horrifying murder of two Indonesian women at his upscale Hong Kong apartment in a cocaine-fueled rampage appealed against his conviction Tuesday.

Cambridge University graduate Rurik Jutting tortured Sumarti Ningsih for three days — filming parts of her ordeal on his phone — before slashing her throat with a serrated knife and stuffing her body into a suitcase.

Days later, and with Ningsih’s corpse on his balcony, the former Bank of America worker picked up Seneng Mujiasih, intending to play out the same fantasies. He killed her when she started screaming.

Jutting, now 32, had pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility but was found guilty of murder with the judge at the time describing the killings as “sickening in the extreme.”

However, Jutting’s defense team Tuesday argued that judge Michael Stuart-Moore had repeatedly given wrong directions to the jury during the trial last year when explaining how they should determine whether his state of mind had impaired his responsibility for his actions.

Defense lawyer Gerard McCoy argued the judge had wrongly told the jury to look for mental “disorders” rather than the broader spectrum of “abnormality of the mind.”

“Abnormality of mind need not be a disorder,” Mr. McCoy told the court Tuesday.

“The judge has wrongly and prescriptively directed the jury that they should look for disorders because disorders are what is an abnormality of mind,” he added.

DIMINISHED RESPONSIBILITY
The defense team during the trial had argued that Jutting’s mental responsibility had been substantially affected by heavy alcohol and cocaine use as well as sexual sadism and narcissistic personality disorders.

Not all four medical experts who testified agreed that Jutting’s behavior met the criteria for a “disorder” in all four areas, said Mr. McCoy.

However, they did all find that Jutting was suffering from an abnormality of mind because he had impaired mental functioning, he added.

“The ground of appeal is the judge wrongly directed the jury as to the true meaning of abnormality of the mind,” Mr. McCoy argued Tuesday afternoon.

“All four experts agreed there were four concurrent abnormalities of the mind,” he added.

“That’s what the jury should have been asked: did those four functionings constitute an abnormality of the mind?”

Jutting was alert and taking notes in court Tuesday, dressed in a blue shirt and wearing dark-rimmed glasses, at one point smiling and talking with the guards in the dock.

In the grueling 10-day trial last October and November, the jury heard how Jutting became obsessed with slavery, rape and torture — fantasies he acted out on his first victim, Ningsih.

The jury was forced to watch iPhone footage of parts of the attack as well as Jutting’s own self-recorded descriptions of how he had used pliers, sex toys and a belt during the killing.

He then went on to murder his second victim, Mujiasih, slashing her throat in his living room.

At the end of the trial, Mr. Stuart-Moore said Jutting had known what he was doing and described him as an “archetypal sexual predator” who presented an extreme danger to women.

The hearing continued Tuesday. — AFP