Saudi Arabia has been working to foil any agreements that renew a pledge to transition away from fossil fuels, according to negotiators, says the New York Times.
Negotiators say it’s part of a yearlong campaign by Saudi Arabia to stymie an agreement made last year by 200 nations to move away from oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is dangerously heating the planet.
“Maybe they’ve been emboldened by Trump’s victory, but they are acting with abandon here,” said Alden Meyer, senior associate with E3G, a London-based climate research organisation, who is at the talks in Azerbaijan. “They’re just being a wrecking ball.”
Saudi Arabia was one of the signatories to that deal, but has been working ever since to bury that pledge and make sure it’s not repeated in any new global agreements, according to five diplomats who requested anonymity to discuss the closed-door negotiations.
With varying degrees of success, the Saudis have opposed transition language in at least five UN resolutions this year, the diplomats said. The Saudis fought it at a United Nations nuclear conference, at a summit of small island nations, during discussions of a UN blueprint for tackling global challenges, at a biodiversity summit and at a meeting of the Group of 20 finance ministers in Washington in October, according to the diplomats.
UN rules require that any agreement forged at climate summits be endorsed by all 198 participating nations. That means Saudi Arabia, or any other nation, can sink a deal.
Diplomats inside the rooms in Baku said the current Saudi opposition was unlike anything they had seen. It is taking the form of procedural objections that have blocked almost every set of talks, whether on carbon markets, decarbonization, or scientific research. Saudi diplomats have blocked negotiating texts, some of which were years in the making, from being allowed to move forward and, in at least one case, flatly refused to join meetings.
In one forum where diplomats were discussing how to help countries decarbonize, a Saudi diplomat accused other countries of negotiating in bad faith and told negotiators that they would not join in further meetings this week, according to one person in the room who was taking notes.
Joanna Depledge, an expert on climate negotiations at the University of Cambridge who has written extensively about Saudi Arabia, called the government “blatant and brazen” in its opposition to action on climate change.
“Whereas the US might disagree strongly on something, they are usually well argued with some legal justification,” Ms. Depledge said. “But with the Saudis it’s literally a flat ‘no’ with no attempt to really justify or listen, or it uses procedural arguments that waste time.”
Saudi Arabia fought efforts at COP28 to agree to a phase out of fossil fuels using tactics like giving long speeches that ate up nearly all the allotted meeting times, and inserting words into draft agreements that were considered poison pills by other countries.
Eventually, under enormous pressure from small island nations and the host government, the United Arab Emirates, the Saudis acquiesced to language calling on nations to contribute to “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.”
Almost immediately, Saudi Arabia appeared to work against the promise.
Days after the summit, the kingdom’s energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, declared that nations had only agreed to an “à la carte menu.” Posting the Dubai agreement on a faux French menu, he told attendees at a minerals conference in Riyadh that the section calling for a transition also asked nations to do several other things, like triple renewable energy, double energy efficiency measures and accelerate nuclear energy.
“What we have achieved is choices that people can pick,” the prince said.
His speech kicked off a yearlong Saudi effort to make sure that the transition language did not find its way into any other forum.When the International Atomic Energy Agency held a first-ever nuclear summit in Brussels in March, Saudi delegates sought to block any language about an energy transition, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.
During the same month, Amin Nasser, the head of Saudi Aramco, which is the world’s biggest oil producer, told a gathering of the oil industry in Houston, “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.”