‘Wrecking ball’: The oil-rich nation blocking UN climate talks

The COP29 climate talks in Azerbaijan are dragging towards an ugly and late finish as powerful voices call for massive reforms to the system, while a voting bloc led by Saudi Arabia seeks to slow progress and even undo a key success from last year.

The oil industry still dominates Baku, host to the COP29 United Nations climate talks.Credit: AP

The well-funded Saudi Arabian diplomatic machine has been acting as a “wrecking ball”, says Alden Meyer, a veteran of 28 of these vast and messy events who is now a senior analyst with the London-based climate research group E3G.

Meyer says Saudi Arabia has become so adept at playing the complex game of United Nations climate diplomacy that it led the push for the organisation to adopt a consensus approach. That would mean making a major decision would require all 200 or so countries signed up to the climate treaty to agree.

That makes it very easy for Saudi Arabia and sympathetic oil-rich nations to slow the process. Even better, from their point of view, reforming the system also needs consensus.

“It was a brilliant strategy by Saudi Arabia,” Meyer told this masthead. “They’re very dogged. They’re very persistent. They have well-financed delegations covering all these multilateral spaces, and their objective is very consistent – do anything that they can to prevent action that threatens their oil products.”

At issue in Azerbaijan is not just emissions but finance. At the heart of the Paris Agreement is the recognition that nations in the treaty have a “common but differentiated responsibility” for climate change.

This recognises that all countries, rich and poor, must act, but also that rich states dumped most of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and have the resources to pay for the transition to clean technologies and adaptation to a dangerous new world.

In Azerbaijan, the world is seeking an agreement on how much finance the rich world can “mobilise” to help the developing world act on climate and adapt to it. This is known as the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), which will replace an expired US$100 billion ($153.6 billion) annual finance pledge. Australia’s Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen and his Egyptian counterpart are leading these negotiations.

NCQG negotiators have been wrestling over the size of the new target – $US1.3 trillion ($2 trillion) is one proposal – and how much of it should be donated, provided via private sector investment, and deployed by development banks.

They are even sparring over which nations should be among the donors and which ones recipients.

Rich nations say that China should no longer be viewed as a developing recipient, as it is currently under the agreement.

Either way, the fight over finance goes straight back to the greenhouse gases at the heart of the climate threat. The world cannot put itself on track to stabilise the climate at 1.5 degrees without the trust and effort of rapidly expanding developing economies. Without a strong finance pledge, global co-operative action will fray.

“Don’t use the word ‘donor’. That implies charity. There is a climate debt that needs to be paid. We are talking about lives and livelihoods. Our people are paying with their lives,” said Jiwoh Abdulai, Sierra Leone’s climate change minister.

As this issue plays out, Saudi Arabia and its allies want to remove from the talks any reference to “phasing down” the use of fossil fuels. This language is crucial because its inclusion in last year’s agreement is seen as the key achievement of those talks – the first-ever acknowledgement in a UN climate treaty text that not only did the world need to stop using fossil fuels, but that they are the heart of the climate problem in the first place.

Last week, a group of the world’s climate leaders wrote to the UN calling for reform, saying that the Conference of the Parties (COP) in “its current structure simply cannot deliver the change at exponential speed and scale, which is essential to ensure a safe climate landing for humanity”.

It called for the talks to shift focus from “negotiation to implementation” to ensure the energy transition is accelerated and fossil fuels are phased out. It also recommended that the meetings be shrunk and streamlined and that scientific voices be amplified over the fossil fuel lobbyists that now swamp the annual event.

Even if those reforms are ever made, it will be too late to help this year’s negotiations as they lumber into overtime.

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