Poorer nations have qualms about reducing their carbon emission as this could have significant impact on their economic growth.
India's environment minister Prakash Javadekar has earlier said that he hopes that developed nations would carry more of the burden of reducing emissions because they were primarily responsible for historical emissions of greenhouse gas.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, however, said that wealthy and poor nations alike should play their part in tackling the issue of climate change.
On Thursday, Kelly told the delegates of the UN climate change summit in Lima, Peru that all nations should work for the UN deal to fight climate change citing that there is little time to reverse the world's path to tragedy.
Kerry said that the future generation will not forgive the present generation for failing to act on the overwhelming evidence that the world is warming, criticizing those who question whether climate change is indeed primarily caused by human activities particularly by emissions from burning of fossil fuels.
"They will want to know how we together could possibly have been so blind, so ideological, so dysfunctional, and frankly, so stubborn," Kerry said. "You don't need a Ph.D. to be able to see for yourself that the world is already changing."
Kerry cited that thirteen of the warmest years in recorded history occurred after 2000 and 2014 is on the track to becoming the hottest year since record-keeping started. Even if the scientific findings of man-made climate change was wrong, Kerry said that shifting to renewable energy sources can still have positive effects such as better health and improved energy security worldwide.
He also said that while rich nations including the U.S. are mainly responsible for historical carbon emissions, they cannot tackle the problem of the changing climate alone.
Kerry said that although the Obama administration knows that the U.S. should take the lead in the issue due to it being the major carbon emitter since the beginning of the industrial revolution, it does not mean that developing nations should go on freely building coal-fired power plants as their increasing emissions could reduce the effects of America's reduced emissions.
Kerry stressed that every nation needs to do its part including developing nations whose rates of emission are rising fast. He said that more than half of the world's emission now comes from developing countries, which necessitates that they also act on the climate change issue.
