Saudi Arabia Is Working to Undercut a Pledge to Quit Fossil Fuels

Despite endorsing a transition away from fossil fuels last year, Saudi officials have since worked to undermine it in at least five U.N. forums, diplomats said.

As United Nations climate talks enter their final week in Azerbaijan and G20 leaders gather in Brazil, diplomats from Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, are working to foil any agreement that renews a pledge to transition away from fossil fuels, negotiators said.

“Maybe they’ve been emboldened by Trump’s victory, but they are acting with abandon here,” said Alden Meyer, senior associate with E3G, a London-based climate research organization, who is at the talks in Azerbaijan. “They’re just being a wrecking ball.”

Negotiators say it’s part of a year-long campaign by Saudi Arabia to foil an agreement made last year by 200 nations to move away from oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is dangerously heating the planet.

Saudi Arabia was one of the signatories to that deal, but has been working ever since to bury that pledge and make sure it’s not repeated in any new global agreements, according to five diplomats who requested anonymity to discuss the closed-door negotiations.

With varying degrees of success, the Saudis have opposed transition language in at least five U.N. resolutions this year, the diplomats said. The Saudis fought it at a United Nations nuclear conference, at a summit of small island nations, during discussions of a U.N. blueprint for tackling global challenges, at a biodiversity summit and at a meeting of the Group of 20 finance ministers in Washington in October, according to the diplomats.

Saudi government officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The election of Donald J. Trump has cast a pall over the climate negotiations in Azerbaijan, known as COP29. Mr. Trump has promised to withdraw the United States from the global fight against climate change and increase the American production of fossil fuels, which is already at record levels. That may be emboldening Saudi officials at the current climate talks, analysts say. On Saturday, Yasir O. Al-Rumayyan, the chairman of the board at Saudi Aramco, the state petroleum company, sat ringside with Mr. Trump at a U.F.C. fight in Madison Square Garden in New York City.

U.N. rules require that any agreement forged at climate summits be endorsed by all 198 participating nations. That means Saudi Arabia, or any other nation, can sink a deal.

Saudi Arabia isn’t the only country resisting the promise of a global transition away from fossil fuels or slowing progress in Baku. Countries are supposed to set new financial goals to help developing countries address global warming, and there are deep divisions between rich and poor nations about how to move forward.

But diplomats inside the rooms in Baku said the current Saudi opposition was unlike anything they had seen. It is taking the form of procedural objections that have blocked almost every set of talks, whether on carbon markets, decarbonization, or scientific research. Saudi diplomats have blocked negotiating texts, some of which were years in the making, from being allowed to move forward and, in at least one case, flatly refused to join meetings.

In one forum where diplomats were discussing how to help countries decarbonize, a Saudi diplomat accused other countries of negotiating in bad faith and told negotiators that they would not join in further meetings this week, according to one person in the room who was taking notes.

Joanna Depledge, an expert on climate negotiations at the University of Cambridge who has written extensively about Saudi Arabia, called the government “blatant and brazen” in its opposition to action on climate change.

“Whereas the U.S. might disagree strongly on something, they are usually well argued with some legal justification,” Ms. Deplege said. “But with the Saudis it’s literally a flat ‘no’ with no attempt to really justify or listen, or it uses procedural arguments that waste time.”

Saudi Arabia fought efforts at COP28 to agree to a phase out fossil fuels using tactics like giving long speeches that ate up nearly all the allotted meeting times, and inserting words into draft agreements that were considered poison pills by other countries.

Eventually, under enormous pressure from small island nations and the host government, the United Arab Emirates, the Saudis acquiesced to language calling on nations to contribute to “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.”

Almost immediately, Saudi Arabia appeared to work against the promise.

Days after the summit, the kingdom’s energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, declared that nations had only agreed to an “à la carte menu.” Posting the Dubai agreement on a faux French menu, he told attendees at a minerals conference in Riyadh that the section calling for a transition also asked nations to do several other things, like triple renewable energy, double energy efficiency measures and accelerate nuclear energy.

“What we have achieved is choices that people can pick,” the prince said.

His speech kicked off a yearlong Saudi effort to make sure that the transition language did not find its way into any other forum.

When the International Atomic Energy Agency held a first-ever nuclear summit in Brussels in March, Saudi delegates sought to block any language about an energy transition, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.

During the same month, Amin Nasser, the head of Saudi Aramco, which is world’s biggest oil producer, told a gathering of the oil industry in Houston, “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.”

The Saudi delegation continued its efforts in May at a meeting of the fourth International Conference on Small Island Developing States, diplomats said. They were largely successful: The summit ended with a declaration that referenced the need to develop renewable energy but nothing about a transition away from fossil fuels.

At the Summit of the Future 2024, a high-level U.N. event in September in New York aimed at creating a global consensus on how to address issues like climate change and international security, the Saudi delegation was less effective. Over Saudi objections, the final pact called for movement away from fossil fuels.

But those present said the dispute was so fierce that, a month later when two countries at the Convention on Biological Diversity in Columbia tried to insert a provision linking fossil fuel emissions with biodiversity loss, few had the appetite for another fight. An energy transition never became part of the negotiating text, said Alex Rafalowicz, executive director of the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty, a nonprofit group that works to persuade countries to phase out oil, gas, and coal. He said the Saudi opposition took place outside of public view and took the form of procedural objections.

Finally, in G20 meetings held in Washington in September, the Saudi team initially refused to support a task force on climate and finance if it included language on the fossil fuel transition.

Avinash Persaud, a climate adviser at the Inter-American Development Bank, said Saudi delegates at the G20 climate meeting argued that certain discussions about transitioning away from fossil fuels had to occur in other specific settings, not in the ones in which diplomats were negotiating at the time.

The final agreement “recalled” the fossil fuel transition but stopped short of endorsing it.

Mr. Rafalowicz said the repetition of agreements, like the transition away from fossil fuels, actually matters. Since climate deals are not legally binding, reinforcing agreements in other forums is the only way to cement countries’ promises, he said.

“When they say something once that’s an indication of direction,” Mr. Rafalowicz said. “When it gets reaffirmed at higher political levels, then it becomes clear that’s the standard and there’s no going back.”

David Gelles contributed reporting from Baku, Azerbaijan, and Catrin Einhorn from New York.