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The COP29 climate talks in Azerbaijan are dragging towards an ugly and late finish as powerful voices call for massive reforms to the system, while a voting bloc led by Saudi Arabia seeks to slow progress and even undo a key success from last year.
The oil industry still dominates Baku, host to the COP29 United Nations climate talks.Credit: AP
The well-funded Saudi Arabian diplomatic machine has been acting as a “wrecking ball”, says Alden Meyer, a veteran of 28 of these vast and messy events who is now a senior analyst with the London-based climate research group E3G.
Meyer says Saudi Arabia has become so adept at playing the complex game of United Nations climate diplomacy that it led the push for the organisation to adopt a consensus approach. That would mean making a major decision would require all 200 or so countries signed up to the climate treaty to agree.
That makes it very easy for Saudi Arabia and sympathetic oil-rich nations to slow the process. Even better, from their point of view, reforming the system also needs consensus.
“It was a brilliant strategy by Saudi Arabia,” Meyer told this masthead. “They’re very dogged. They’re very persistent. They have well-financed delegations covering all these multilateral spaces, and their objective is very consistent – do anything that they can to prevent action that threatens their oil products.”
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At issue in Azerbaijan is not just emissions but finance. At the heart of the Paris Agreement is the recognition that nations in the treaty have a “common but differentiated responsibility” for climate change.
This recognises that all countries, rich and poor, must act, but also that rich states dumped most of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and have the resources to pay for the transition to clean technologies and adaptation to a dangerous new world.
In Azerbaijan, the world is seeking an agreement on how much finance the rich world can “mobilise” to help the developing world act on climate and adapt to it. This is known as the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), which will replace an expired US$100 billion ($153.6 billion) annual finance pledge. Australia’s Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen and his Egyptian counterpart are leading these negotiations.