Editor’s note: Grist is hosting a free virtual event on January 9, 2025, at 2 pm EST / 11 am PST to analyze the progress and challenges seen at the U.N. climate conference known as COP29. Join Grist’s Jake Bittle in conversation with attendees and experts about where global climate negotiations go from here. Register here.
After a painstaking deadlock lasting nearly a week, the annual United Nations climate conference appeared to veer off course on Thursday. New negotiating texts were released in the morning, just as a rancid smell from what seemed to be a sewage leak spread throughout a central area of the conference venue in Baku, Azerbaijan.
These half-dozen templates incensed countries as disparate as Zambia and New Zealand. Negotiators from both the developed and developing world argued that the Azerbaijani officials leading the conference, which is known as COP29, hadn’t done enough to push forward an ambitious deal that would build upon the so-called UAE consensus — a deal brokered at last year’s COP28 in Dubai, in which the nearly 200 countries of the world finally agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels and accelerate decarbonization within the next 10 years. As of now, this year’s tentative agreement contains almost none of the COP29 proposals, like those ventured by European nations and small island states in the Pacific, that would advance this ambition.
In fact, the new text released on Thursday did not even mention the landmark COP28 agreement — or even affirm the world’s commitment to a clean energy transition at all. It also omitted last year’s promises to triple renewable energy deployment and double energy efficiency. Proposals to phase out coal and fossil fuel subsidies, which many climate-ambitious nations like Germany had pushed, were nowhere to be found, either.
“This is actually going in the opposite direction,” said Wopke Hoekstra, the European Union climate commissioner, in a gaggle with reporters. “That is not acceptable. We cannot accept the view that apparently for some, the previous COP did not happen.”
With just a day to go until the summit closes, climate-ambitious ministers from around the world have begun to blast the Azerbaijani conference presidency for what they say is a slide backwards on the all-important issue of ditching fossil fuels. In U.N. parlance, the “presidency” is a neutral party made up of political operatives and ministers from the country hosting a given year’s climate talks. Although they hail from the host country, they co-administer COP along with the bureaucracy of the United Nations, and they aren’t supposed to put their thumb on the scale for their own government’s interests — or anyone else’s.
Even so, presidencies have immense control over the negotiating process, which inevitably gives them the power to steer the process to their desired ends — especially when talks break down early. This became clear last year when the United Arab Emirates, which hosted COP28 in Dubai, intervened to push through a deal to transition away from fossil fuels over the objections of many other oil-producing nations.
There has been a sense of deja vu in Azerbaijan, a country where oil makes up an even larger share of economic output, and where attendees can see oil refineries from the windows of shuttle buses that ferry them to the conference. Even before the conference began, a watchdog group caught a senior Azerbaijani official on video suggesting he would use COP29 to facilitate deals for the nation’s state-owned oil company. On the second day of the summit, Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, called fossil fuels a “gift from God.”
Negotiators’ fears that the COP presidency would tip the scales grew stronger when Saudi Arabia, which produces around 12 percent of the world’s crude oil, began to throw diplomatic wrenches in almost every negotiation arena last week. Officials from the oil-rich kingdom delayed and disputed agenda items even in talks that had nothing to do with fossil fuels, forcing discussion of untenable language and refusing to attend meetings where their presence was necessary for talks to progress.
At the end of the first week, the Saudis seemed to have gotten their way. Not only was the draft text on global decarbonization in miserable shape, but negotiators couldn’t even agree about where to place it on the agenda — a dispute akin to arguing over where to park at the grocery store before you even go in and start shopping. The dummy text even included a menacing caveat: ”Parties have strongly diverging views on whether or not the following textual elements should be discussed.”
The 60,000-odd people at COP waited days as ministers and heads of state consulted with each other and the Azerbaijani presidency in closed-door meetings. With more than a week of negotiations in the rearview, it fell to Babayev and his deputies to sort out a mess of diverging positions. Most country leaders who spoke at the conference on Thursday said he has so far failed to do that.
“I think there’s a divide,” said Eamon Ryan, the environment minister for Ireland, in a gaggle with reporters early Thursday. He accused the most recent U.N. proposal on mitigation — the term of art for the U.N.’s decarbonization agenda — of “sticking just to the status quo for vested interests in the current fossil fuel system.”
It’s not just major oil producers who may oppose a more ambitious mitigation proposal: Several countries in the large G77 group of developing nations have been wary of endorsing a document with a firmer commitment to the energy transition without a complementary commitment from the world’s high-emitting, wealthy nations to help pay for it.
Harjeet Singh, the global director of the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative, an organization advocating for the global phaseout of oil and gas, said the developing countries’ opposition to a decision that restates last year’s UAE consensus is an attempt to push for more funding from the developed world. These countries don’t want to re-endorse the energy transition decision from last year without a clear signal they’ll get money to help move away from oil and gas and build out renewable energy.
“It’s a sequencing problem,” he said. “We wanted [in Dubai] to triple renewable energy and double energy efficiency. Who will provide finance for that?”
There is also some evidence that the presidency has given space to the interests of major fossil fuel producers on the sidelines of the conference. Negotiators from several countries, who spoke to Grist on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of ongoing negotiations, have decried the presidency’s last-minute appointment of a new leader to an official forum on the negative impacts of decarbonization efforts. The three negotiators who spoke to Grist have accused the presidency of making this decision on behalf of Saudi Arabia, despite widespread objections.
This alleged intervention came during negotiations over a little-noticed agenda item titled “Impact of implementation of response measures.” This unassuming item, which has been on COP agendas for decades, is a key forum for oil-producing countries. That’s because “response measures” refers to policies that mitigate carbon emissions and climate change, and the forum is an opportunity to highlight the adverse effects of climate-friendly policies.
Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries have traditionally used the Response Measures group as an opportunity to decry the harms that more climate-ambitious nations are causing them, according to negotiators who have held senior roles in response measures discussions. The forum’s main task this year was to agree on the topics it should discuss over the next five years. The proposals under consideration include “economic diversification” and “impacts of the implementation of response measures on human rights” — topics of special interest to the Saudis, who have an oil-centric economy and have been accused of violating human rights.
The talks progressed well for the first few days at COP29, according to the three negotiators who were involved. But at the end of the week, Saudi Arabia moved to discredit negotiators from Botswana and Iceland who were leading the discussion, telling the presidency they weren’t qualified and hadn’t produced any results. On the first day of the conference’s all-important final week, the Azerbaijani presidency then intervened to replace the two negotiators criticized by the Saudis and install a replacement named Andrei Marcu, a veteran COP negotiator from Brussels, Belgium, who is currently affiliated with the Honduran delegation and has represented Belize and Papua New Guinea in past climate talks.
The decision to appoint Marcu incensed developing countries and the United States, who saw it as a favor to Saudi Arabia, according to the three delegation members who were involved in the response measures talks. In past COPs, Marcu has sought to chair the “response measures” agenda item, but developing countries have protested and forced him out, alleging him of steering the committee’s work to favor the interests of oil-producing countries.
“We’ve had problems with him before,” said one negotiator from a developing country who has been deeply involved in the talks. Marcu resigned from the role on Tuesday amid criticism from Africa and the United States, but the presidency re-appointed him the following day. (The COP29 presidency, the Saudi Arabian delegation, and Marcu all did not respond to requests for comment from Grist.)
Stagnation on the issue of fossil fuels appears likely to push the conference past its final scheduled day and into the weekend. As accusations flew at press conferences and huddles, the Azerbaijani presidency on midday Thursday convened a plenary session which it styled a qurultay, an Azerbaijani word for convention that also refers to a type of ancient military council. During the plenary, several countries voiced their dissatisfaction with the status quo on decarbonization and fossil fuels or chastised the presidency for failing to make progress on the goal to mobilize as much as $1.3 trillion in international climate finance.
“We have heard clearly in this room that this text is completely disconnected from real lives,” said Tina Stege, the climate envoy from the Marshall Islands, during the plenary. “We cannot play geopolitics with the lives of our citizens.”
A representative from Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, asserted at the plenary — in apparent disregard for his country’s own endorsement of the UAE consensus last year — that it and other Arab countries “will not accept any text that targets specific sectors, including fossil fuels.”
After the plenary, Stege told Grist that the text on mitigation was “not a starting point that works.” At the time, the conference was just over 24 hours away from its scheduled end.
