Russia and Saudi Arabia lead opposition to fossil fuel transition road map
This year’s COP will be considered an ugly compromise at best. Brazil had chosen to host Belem, its gateway to the Amazon, and will be bitterly disappointed to have failed to secure a formal agreement to stop global deforestation. This effort will now be removed from the COP process.
Negotiators from 80 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Britain and Germany, have failed to agree on a “road map” to move the global economy away from fossil fuels. The group included the United Kingdom, Germany and oil producers such as Mexico and Brazil, as well as many developing countries most affected by climate change.
Minister for Climate and Energy Chris Bowen was in Brazil for COP30 earlier this week.Credit: access point
Russia and Saudi Arabia led the opposition.
COP presidents appointed by host countries are not diplomatic figures. In the months before the annual talks, they and their teams have been setting up and executing their negotiating paths, wrangling more than 190 countries in in-person talks to agree on a set of costly initiatives that could guide the world’s efforts to stabilize the climate.
Australian Industry Group Climate Change and Energy chair Tennant Reed, who is also in Belem and has been at the last eight COPs, said the process was getting harder as the decisions facing the world got tougher.
The COP failed to achieve one of Paris’s goals of stopping warming at 1.5 degrees, at least without a significant and long-lasting overshoot. The State Department, once one of the world’s biggest engines of climate diplomacy, is in danger of losing the support it receives from the United States. It has not complied with agreements to transfer sufficient funds for adaptation from developed countries to developing countries and has not yet developed an economically viable pathway away from fossil fuels, as agreed in Dubai two years ago.
The world won’t get any easier, either, especially as climate-induced extreme weather conditions exacerbate international tensions and worsen economies in the coming years.
“There is no easy choice left [to the COP]. Soon he will have to start making terrible choices. It may not be next year, but it’s coming,” says Reed.
Former NSW Liberal treasurer Matt Kean, who now serves as chairman of the federal Climate Change Authority and is also based in Belem, strikes an optimistic tone.
He noted that climate talks have already reduced the warming path from 5 degrees to 2.5 degrees if all nations meet their commitments.
“It’s not enough, but it proves that collaboration can work,” he says.
What about Chris Bowen?
“Well, there’s no one more qualified or more respected on that stage,” Kean said.
UN climate chief Simon Stiell has struggled to find any silver lining in the past two weeks.
“I’m not saying we won the climate war,” he said when the talks ended. “But we are undeniably still in this together.”
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