COP28 heads for extra time as majority clashes with Saudi Arabia

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The UN climate summit was headed towards eleventh-hour negotiations on Tuesday as the majority of countries present clashed with Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing nations over whether to commit to the phaseout of fossil fuels.

Some negotiators said that about 80 per cent of the almost 200 countries at COP28 were seeking to strengthen draft conclusions that proposed only voluntary reductions in gas, oil and coal production and consumption.

Diplomats said Riyadh remained the key obstacle to a stronger declaration and was backed by other Opec and Opec+ countries such as Iraq and Russia.

“There is a supermajority [of countries] that do want more ambition,” said EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra. “That is what we owe to everyone watching around the world.”

The EU, US, UK, Australia, Canada and island states vulnerable to climate change have all hit out at the text for its omission of any references to scrapping fossil fuels to limit global warming.

“We don’t want to sign the death certificate of our islands,” said Toeolesulusulu Cedric Schuster, Samoa’s minister for natural resources and the environment, after a meeting between UN secretary-general António Guterres and a so-called high-ambition coalition of countries.

The meetings in Dubai cap a two-week period of negotiations with talks grinding into the early hours of Tuesday and resuming a few hours later.

A series of other countries’ officials visited Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, half-brother of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in a bid to persuade the oil-rich kingdom to shift its position.

Ministers from around the world have accused Riyadh of piling pressure on Sultan al-Jaber, COP28 president and head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, to shift the text’s focus away from fossil fuels.

European diplomats said that, by setting out measures that countries “could” take, this week’s draft in effect transformed crucial actions to limit global warming into a mere list of options.

Diplomats also discussed the need for financing to help wean countries off fossil fuels and adapt to climate change, especially nations struggling to access capital markets. 

China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua, a UN summit veteran, has described the meeting as “the most difficult COP” he has attended. Diplomats said Beijing itself was less resistant to strong action to suppress fossil fuels than it had been in the past. Xie has said China wants a text that “points in the right direction” and “is acceptable to all parties”.

French energy minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher said leaders from a range of countries in the EU, South America, Asia and Africa were united on the need to reduce fossil fuels in the global energy mix when they met “with a lot of emotion” to prepare a response to the draft text.

“I think for the first time we heard in a public way, in a strong way, developed and developing countries share the same vision,” she said.

In a press conference on Tuesday morning, Majid al-Suwaidi, director-general of COP28, said “there are lots of words in the text” and that it was “easy for negotiators to get hung up on one word and focus on one thing”.

“Our goal is that the whole package makes everyone happy and clearly charts a path towards [limiting temperature rises to] 1.5C.”

Additional reporting by Simeon Kerr