Australia’s Cop31 chief negotiator plans to lobby petrostates on fossil fuel phaseout | Cop31

Chris Bowen wants to use his role as chief global climate negotiator to lobby Saudi Arabia and others to stop resisting progress at UN summits, heeding calls for a “tough-headed” approach to tackling major greenhouse gas emitters that are blocking the transition.

Australia’s climate change and energy minister, who was appointed as the “chairman of negotiations” for COP31 under the agreement that gave Türkiye the right to host the conference, told Guardian Australia that the focus ahead of the summit would be talks with countries “with whom we traditionally disagree”.

Bowen mentioned that oil-rich Gulf nation Saudi Arabia has been repeatedly accused of blocking efforts at UN summits to accelerate the phase-out of fossil fuels.

“If we have a whimsical festival, we won’t get anywhere,” Bowen said.

“We need a Policeman who actually tries to cross some of the bridges that have been very difficult to cross in recent Copts.”

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When asked how this would be achieved, Bowen said: “participation, participation, participation”.

Bowen’s comments followed a direct call from former US secretary of state John Kerry for Australia to actively push the world’s biggest emitters, including China, Russia, the US and India, to develop a road map to end the era of fossil fuels.

The Trump administration this week withdrew from a key international agreement to address the climate crisis, effectively leaving the UN climate arena; This means Bowen has little capacity to influence the US through Polis negotiations.

The Labor minister said the fact that Australia itself was a major fossil fuel exporter meant it had “credibility” when it came to lobbying petrostates to do more.

The COP30 summit in Brazil ended with an agreement that made no direct mention of fossil fuels, following opposition from Saudi Arabia and its allies.

But more than 80 countries, including Australia, have signed a separate “Belém declaration” pledging nations to work towards ending fuel use in a “fair, orderly and equitable” manner.

Bowen is seeking a more successful outcome at Cop31, aiming to take a “meaningful step forward” from the 2023 summit in Dubai, where countries first agreed to begin phasing out fossil fuels.

According to the agreement reached by Australia with Türkiye, a pre-conference event will be held in the Pacific to draw global attention to small island countries that are under existential threat due to the climate crisis.

Despite the disappointment of missing out on full hosting rights after a years-long tender process, Bowen said Cop31 was a “remarkable opportunity for Australia”.

Bowen asked the Pacific Islands Forum to choose a host for the event; This will be used in part to encourage countries to contribute to development.egion’s climate resilience fund.

The Labor frontbencher made the comments in an interview outlining his priorities for 2026, when he will balance international duties with managing the domestic energy transition.

Bowen described progress on reducing pollution as “good, a lot has been done, but there’s still a lot to do” after the government showed it was making good progress towards meeting the 2030 target but needed to significantly step up policies to meet the new 2035 target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 62% to 70% below 2005 levels.

Upcoming reviews of the safeguard mechanism designed to reduce pollution at large industrial facilities and the national vehicle efficiency standard introduced to increase the penetration of electric cars offer two early opportunities to move faster.

productivity commission Last month, it proposed expanding the safeguard mechanism to catch more pollutants, building on Labor’s changes to the program in 2023.

schema Applicable to 219 sites, it covers facilities that emit more than 100,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent each year.

Bowen would not pre-empt the review, which is a legal requirement, but cautioned that including more businesses would not necessarily be the solution.

“When we look at the threshold, it’s going to be a balancing act. You don’t want to expand so much that you bring in a bunch of new companies without paying a lot of money in terms of emissions,” he said.

“It’s kind of a slam dunk to say that the obvious thing to do is to cover a lot more businesses.”