U.N. Climate Chief Warns Countries Against ‘Hiding Behind Loopholes’
U.N. Climate Chief Warns Countries Against ‘Hiding Behind Loopholes’
Simon Stiell used a speech in Azerbaijan to set expectations for global climate negotiations there this year.
By Max Bearak
Feb. 2, 2024
Sign up for Your Places: Global Update. All the latest news for any part of the world you select. Get it sent to your inbox.
In a speech on Friday, the United Nations climate chief painted an optimistic picture of the fight against global warming while taking a jab at countries that avoid meeting their obligations by “hiding behind loopholes” in global agreements.
The comments delivered by Simon Stiell amounted to an early attempt to set expectations for the next round of United Nations climate talks, scheduled for November in Azerbaijan. It will be the second year running that a major exporter of fossil fuels hosts the talks (the last round was in the United Arab Emirates), a fact that has drawn sharp criticism given the central role of fossil fuels in producing the greenhouse gases that drive global warming.
The speech, in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, came on the heels of recent comments by the oil minister of Saudi Arabia that global agreements to fight climate change were like an à la carte arrangement in which countries could selectively decide what to do about fossil fuel use.
Latest News on Climate Change and the Environment
Card 1 of 5
An acute drought. Climate change fueled the remarkable 2023 drought that drained major rivers, fueled huge wildfires and threatened the livelihoods of millions of people in the Amazon rainforest, scientists said in a new study.
Greenland’s ice sheet. The island’s expansive ice sheet is known to be shrinking, especially since the 1990s, because of warming from climate change. Now, a new study reveals that about 20% more of the Greenland ice sheet has disappeared than previous estimates show, potentially threatening ocean currents that help to regulate global temperatures.
Droughts around the world. The U.N. estimates that 1.84 billion people worldwide, or nearly a quarter of humanity, were living under drought in 2022 and 2023, the vast majority in low- and middle-income countries. The crisis, worsened partly by climate change, has been accompanied by soaring food prices and could have consequences for hunger, elections and migration.
U.S. carbon emissions fall. America’s greenhouse gas emissions fell 1.9% in 2023, in large part because the burning of coal to produce electricity plummeted to its lowest level in half a century, according to new research. Still, the decline in emissions to date hasn’t been nearly steep enough to meet that nation’s goals for trying to slow global warming.
High-cost disasters. The United States experienced 28 disasters in 2023 that each cost at least $1 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the highest number on record and the latest measure of the growing financial toll of climate change. The previous record was 2020, which saw 22 billion-dollar events.
“Dodging the hard work ahead through selective interpretation would be entirely self-defeating for any government,” given that climate change affects all nations, Mr. Stiell said, according to a transcript of his prepared remarks.
ADVERTISEMENT
Mr. Stiell’s U.N. agency convenes the summit, but the responsibility for shepherding the negotiations falls primarily on the host country and the conference president it appoints.
Azerbaijan, a major fossil fuel producer, named its environment minister, Mukhtar Babayev, as president of this year’s negotiations. Mr. Babayev spent more than a quarter century working at Azerbaijan’s state oil and gas company and his selection made some climate advocates uneasy, in part because it echoed the appointment of his predecessor, Sultan Al Jaber, who presided over last year’s summit in Dubai.
Mr. Al Jaber, who runs the United Arab Emirates’ national oil company, was initially pilloried but ultimately praised for being able to corral negotiators into an agreement that, for the first time in nearly three decades of summits, called for “transitioning away” from fossil fuels by midcentury.
Mr. Babayev will have significantly more sway over this year’s summit, known as COP29, than Mr. Stiell, who is a former politician from the Caribbean island of Grenada. Mr. Babayev is “ultimately who we want to hear from,” said Tom Evans, who monitors climate negotiations for E3G, a European research organization.
ADVERTISEMENT
Mr. Stiell’s speech is “useful insofar as reminding people of what’s at stake” and why, no matter what may be driving wedges between major powers now, they need to come together to solve the collective threat of climate change, Mr. Evans said. “With multiple wars ongoing it is useful to remind people of the long-term vision not just now, or tomorrow, but decades from now,” he said.
This year’s summit is meant to focus on the thorny issue of what the world’s richer countries, which are responsible for most of the emissions that have caused climate change, owe to poorer ones, which are disproportionately suffering from its effects.
Money has long been both the most important and intractable issue in climate negotiations. Many developing countries look at the prosperity industrialized ones have achieved through producing and burning fossil fuels and feel justified in asking for compensation if they are to be expected to forgo a similar development trajectory.
At the 2022 climate summit in Egypt, nations agreed to create a fund that rich countries would pay into and that developing ones could draw on to pay for costly changes to their environments and economies that would make them more resilient and adaptable to climate change.
ADVERTISEMENT
But the particulars of who pays and how much have been mired in rancorous debate.
And as renewable energy gets cheaper to build in richer countries, that transition is happening far more slowly in poorer ones which have less access to the kinds of credits and loans needed to financing their rollout.
“Looking at the numbers, it’s clear that to achieve this transition, we need money, and lots of it," Mr. Stiell said. “$2.4 trillion, if not more.”