COP28 heads for extra time as majority clashes with Saudi Arabia

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The UN climate summit was headed towards eleventh-hour negotiations on Tuesday as the majority of countries present clashed with Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing nations over whether to commit to the phaseout of fossil fuels.

Some negotiators said that about 80 per cent of the almost 200 countries at COP28 were seeking to strengthen draft conclusions that proposed only voluntary reductions in gas, oil and coal production and consumption.

Diplomats said Riyadh remained the key obstacle to a stronger declaration and was backed by other Opec and Opec+ countries such as Iraq and Russia.

“There is a supermajority [of countries] that do want more ambition,” said EU climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra. “That is what we owe to everyone watching around the world.”

The EU, US, UK, Australia, Canada and island states vulnerable to climate change have all hit out at the text for its omission of any references to scrapping fossil fuels to limit global warming.

“We don’t want to sign the death certificate of our islands,” said Toeolesulusulu Cedric Schuster, Samoa’s minister for natural resources and the environment, after a meeting between UN secretary-general António Guterres and a so-called high-ambition coalition of countries.

The meetings in Dubai cap a two-week period of negotiations with talks grinding into the early hours of Tuesday and resuming a few hours later.

A series of other countries’ officials visited Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, half-brother of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in a bid to persuade the oil-rich kingdom to shift its position.

Ministers from around the world have accused Riyadh of piling pressure on Sultan al-Jaber, COP28 president and head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, to shift the text’s focus away from fossil fuels.

European diplomats said that, by setting out…