Bulgaria, which generates more than 40 percent of its energy from coal, will oppose any further increase in targets to curb carbon emissions, President Rumen Radev said Thursday.

Radev, who will head the Bulgarian delegation at the COP24 UN climate talks next week in the Polish city of Katowice, said that measures to limit climate change were "necessary and urgent."

"But these measures have to be kept within the framework of what has already been agreed, and there should be no increase in the commitments," he said.

Around 1,000 coal miners and power plant workers demonstrated in Sofia on Thursday to protest against calls for increased carbon-cutting measures.

Podkrepa trade union chief Dimitar Manolov said tens of thousands jobs were at stake if Bulgaria is forced to shut down its Maritsa East power plant, one of the most polluting plants in Bulgaria and the 11th dirtiest in Europe.

"We want to preserve the coal energy industry as it is now," Manolov told AFP.

Energy Minister Temenuzhka Petkova visited the plant on Wednesday to try and reassure workers.

The two-week COP24 meeting will seek to breathe new life into the 195-nation Paris Agreement, signed in December 2015, with a number of countries -- notably the United States -- recently backsliding on their original commitments.

The agreement, due to come into effect in 2020, aims to limit global warming to less than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. And countries are being urged to increase their carbon-cutting targets.

In 2017, Bulgaria was reprimanded, but not fined, by the European Court of Justice for repeatedly breaching the EU's air pollution limits.

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France to close 14 nuclear reactors by 2035: Macron
Paris (AFP) Nov 27, 2018
President Emmanuel Macron said Tuesday that France would shut down 14 of the country's 58 nuclear reactors currently in operation by 2035, of which between four and six will be closed by 2030. The total includes the previously announced shutdown of France's two oldest reactors in Fessenheim, eastern France, which Macron said was now set for summer 2020. He also announced that France would close its remaining four coal-fired power plants by 2022 as part of the country's anti-pollution efforts. ... read more