Bonn offers scant relief from climate change

Not much was expected to come out of the UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany, after US President Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement.

And not much seems to have been achieved at the annual gathering of global climate negotiators, which was scheduled to end on Friday but dragged into the wee hours of Saturday.

However, many see a silver lining in the dark clouds of global warming, because a new alliance of 19 countries committed on Thursday to quickly phasing out coal, which was welcomed by many as a "political watershed" that signaled the beginning of the "end of the dirtiest fossil fuel". New promises were made by Angola, Denmark, Mexico and New Zealand for the "Powering Past Coal Alliance", led by the United Kingdom and Canada.