BAKU, Azerbaijan — Negotiators from several of the world’s most powerful economies held a contentious meeting in Saturday’s wee hours as they sought to push through a $300 billion-per-year climate financing deal and break a stalemate at the COP29 summit, two people familiar with the discussions told POLITICO.
The poorer countries that most need the money, and will suffer hardest from the continued failure to lower global carbon pollution, were not in the room.
Now the success or failure of the U.N. climate talks will come down to whether those countries will accept the new financing pledge, just a day after dismissing a $250 billion-a-year proposal as insufficient — or walk.
European Union Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra said: “It is iffy whether we will succeed.”
Organizers of the nearly 200-nation gathering on the Caspian Sea have yet to announce a final agreement as the talks, originally scheduled to close Friday, dragged into their 13th day.
Saturday’s overnight meeting started after 1 a.m. and finally broke up just before sunrise in Baku. There was, according to a European diplomat briefed on the discussions, “lots of shouting.”
Saudi Arabia was the lightning rod for anger during the gathering at Azerbaijan’s Olympic Stadium in Baku, which featured diplomats from Saudi Arabia, China, the United States, India, the United Kingdom, Brazil and Australia, according to the European diplomat and one other person familiar with the details. Both officials, like others in this story, were granted anonymity to discuss the tense and ongoing negotiations.
Saudi Arabia’s representatives said they would not answer questions from the press until the conference had officially ended.
The oil-rich kingdom had been smarting for a year after agreeing during the last COP conference in Dubai to a text that committed the world to transition away from fossil fuels. During this year’s conference in Baku, the Saudis have obstructed almost every effort to negotiate on how that transition might actually happen, according to four European diplomats and two from Latin America.
After the meeting, the rich nations in the room — the U.S., Australia and those from Europe — had agreed to transfer $300 billion per year by 2035 to poor countries to help them fight climate change and transition to cleaner energy, according to two diplomats from Europe, one from South Africa and one from Latin America. That was around $100 billion per year more than most, in particular the U.S., had hoped to agree on coming into the meeting, said the European diplomat, and another official from the same region. The U.S. State Department has repeatedly declined to confirm the amount it was prepared to offer at the talks.
Those details are yet to be confirmed in any draft deal published by the conference organizers.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres spent much of Friday cajoling wealthy countries to raise the number they were promising, after an initial draft offered $250 billion. Analysis by the U.N. and others has found the needs of developing nations run into the trillions every year. But private capital can also be used to fill the gap.
Speaking to POLITICO, Irish Climate Minister Eamon Ryan confirmed that wealthy countries had agreed to increase the finance goal and that Saudi Arabia had blocked any discussion on lowering greenhouse gas pollution.
On Saturday afternoon, U.S. climate envoy John Podesta said negotiators had worked all night and were still crafting an outcome. Asked if they were close, he said: “These things have a shelf life.”
On Saturday morning, top negotiators from the Marshall Islands and Belize said they were unaware of any deal brokered overnight.
Around that time, according to Ryan and another person familiar with the discussions, the Azerbaijani government’s conference organizers held meetings with representatives of 38 small island nations and informed them of the contours of what most expect to be a final take-it-or-leave-it deal, set to be published sometime later Saturday.
“This is what always the developed world does to us in all multilateral agreements,” said Panama’s climate envoy, Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez. “They push and push and push until the last minute. They get us tired, they get us hungry, they get us dizzy, and then we come to terms with agreements that don’t truly represent the needs of our people.”
Sitting on a couch in the rapidly emptying conference venue, Belize’s permanent U.N. representative Carlos Fuller said: “For us, this isn’t only about money. It’s about survival. I think that gets forgotten here.”
Gómez told a reporter: “I’m also listening to ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ by Rihanna nonstop.”
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