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    COP29 Climate Talks Get a Deal on Money, but Only After a Fight

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    The financing plan, which calls for $300 billion per year in support for developing nations, was immediately assailed as inadequate by a string of delegates.Negotiators at this year’s United Nations climate summit struck an agreement early on Sunday in Baku, Azerbaijan, to triple the flow of money to help developing countries adopt cleaner energy and cope with the effects of climate change. Under the deal, wealthy nations pledged to reach $300 billion per year in support by 2035, up from a current target of $100 billion.Independent experts, however, have placed the needs of developing countries much higher, at $1.3 trillion per year. That is the amount they say must be invested in the energy transitions of lower-income countries, in addition to what those countries already spend, to keep the planet’s average temperature rise under 1.5 degrees Celsius. Beyond that threshold, scientists say, global warming will become more dangerous and harder to reverse.The deal struck at the annual U.N.-sponsored climate talks calls on private companies and international lenders like the World Bank to cover the hundreds of billions in the shortfall. That was seen by some as a kind of escape clause for rich countries.As soon as the Azerbaijani hosts banged the gavel and declared the deal done, Chandni Raina, the representative from India, the world’s most populous country, tore into them, saying the process had been “stage managed.”“It is a paltry sum,” Ms. Raina said. “I am sorry to say that we cannot accept it. We seek a much higher ambition from developed countries.” She called the agreement “nothing more than an optical illusion.”Speakers from one developing country after another, from Bolivia to Nigeria to Fiji, echoed Ms. Raina’s remarks and assailed the document in furious statements.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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

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      Despite endorsing the declaration at last year’s U.N. climate summit, officials have tried to eliminate the same language 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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      COP29 Climate Talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, Head Into Final Stretch

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      Senior ministers are arriving in an effort to break a deadlock over the summit’s main goal: funding to help lower-income countries hit hard by global warming.More than halfway through the United Nations climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, negotiators from nearly 200 countries remain far apart on a number of the key issues up for debate.As nations try to agree on a plan to provide potentially trillions of dollars to developing countries suffering from the effects of climate change, divisions remain over how much money should be made available, what kind of financing efforts should count toward the overall goal and how recipient countries should gain access to the funds.Negotiations often go into overtime. But with just four days to go, many attendees fear that this could be the first summit since the Copenhagen talks in 2009 to conclude without a deal.“There is a high risk this could collapse,” said a senior negotiator for a major European country, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.Simon Stiell, the United Nations climate chief, pleaded on Monday with countries to stop fighting and to reach a deal.He warned against a dynamic “where groups of parties dig in and refuse to move on one issue, until others move elsewhere.” He added, “This is a recipe for going literally nowhere.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Loss and Damage Fund Is Taking Shape at COP Climate Talks

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      The U.N. climate summit in Azerbaijan has cleared the for way aid to flow when lower-income countries are hit.A long-awaited fund designed to help lower-income countries respond to natural disasters is finally taking shape at the U.N. climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.Wealthy nations agreed to create the fund at the 2022 climate summit in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, after decades of resistance. Last year, a group of nations, including the United States and the European Union, made the first financial commitments.Now, the fund has a leader and is looking to start distributing money within the next year.Ibrahima Cheikh Diong, who has Senegalese and American citizenship and has held roles at financial firms and at development banks, started this month as the inaugural executive director of the initiative, which is formally known as the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage.At this year’s climate summit, known as COP29, formal agreements were signed that will allow the fund to begin formally receiving the money that has been pledged and to start distributing it soon. The fund is being managed by the United Nations, and the World Bank is serving as a financial trustee.Sweden this month became the latest country to make a pledge, with its $19 million contribution bringing total commitments to around $720 million.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nuclear Power Was Once Shunned at Climate Talks. Now, It’s a Rising Star.

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      Growing worldwide energy demand and other factors have shifted the calculus, but hurdles still lie ahead.For years at global climate summits, nuclear energy was seen by many as part of the problem, not part of the solution.Sama Bilbao y Leon has been attending the annual United Nations climate change talks since 1999, when she was a student of nuclear engineering. And for most of that time, she said, people didn’t want to discuss nuclear power at all.“We had antinuclear groups saying, ‘What are you doing here? Leave!’” she said.These days, it’s a very different story.At last year’s climate conference in the United Arab Emirates, 22 countries pledged, for the first time, to triple the world’s use of nuclear power by midcentury to help curb global warming. At this year’s summit in Azerbaijan, six more countries signed the pledge.“It’s a whole different dynamic today,” said Dr. Bilbao y Leon, who now leads the World Nuclear Association, an industry trade group. “A lot more people are open to talking about nuclear power as a solution.”The list of countries pledging to build new nuclear reactors, which can generate electricity without emitting any planet-warming greenhouse gases, includes longtime users of the technology like Canada, France, South Korea and the United States. But it also includes countries that don’t currently have any nuclear capacity, like Kenya, Mongolia and Nigeria.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Exxon Chief to Trump: Don’t Withdraw From Paris Climate Deal

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      Darren Woods was one of only a few Western oil executives attending a global climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.Darren Woods, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, cautioned President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday against withdrawing from the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions, saying Mr. Trump risked leaving a void at the negotiating table.Mr. Woods, speaking at an annual U.N. climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, described climate negotiations as opportunities for Mr. Trump to pursue common-sense policymaking.“We need a global system for managing global emissions,” Mr. Woods said in an interview with The New York Times in Baku. “Trump and his administrations have talked about coming back into government and bringing common sense back into government. I think he could take the same approach in this space.”Mr. Woods also urged government officials to create incentives for companies to transition to cleaner forms of energy in a profitable way.“The government role is extremely important and one that they haven’t been successfully fulfilling, quite frankly,” he said.Mr. Woods’s presence in a stadium teeming with diplomats is all the more noteworthy because of who is not here in Azerbaijan, a petrostate on the Caspian Sea that was once part of the Soviet Union. Many heads of state, including President Biden, have taken a pass, as have the leaders of several big oil companies like Shell and Chevron.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What to Know About COP29 and How the U.S. Election Affects Climate Talks

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      Diplomats and leaders from around the world are gathering for annual climate negotiations. Here’s what they’re all about and what Donald Trump’s victory means for the meeting.United Nations climate talks are starting in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Monday.The meeting will come just days after the election victory of Donald J. Trump, who has dismissed global warming as a hoax, and at the end of what will probably be the hottest year in recorded history. Extreme weather, much of it made more intense by climate change, is wreaking havoc around the globe.Against that backdrop, diplomats and heads of state from nearly 200 countries are gathering to try to chart a path forward. Here’s a concise guide to the meeting.What to know:What is COP29?When is COP29?Where is COP29?What is the main goal?Who will attend?How will the U.S. election result affect COP29?How will wars affect COP29?What is COP29?It’s an annual gathering of the 197 countries that have agreed to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Those countries, the parties to the convention, come together every year and try to update their plans to address climate change.COP stands for Conference of the Parties. This is the 29th such gathering.In recent years, COP has grown from a relatively insular meeting of diplomats and policy experts into an enormous event that attracts tens of thousands of attendees, including business executives, the leaders of nonprofit groups and activists.When is COP29?The event is scheduled to take place from Nov. 11 to Nov. 22, but the gatherings have a history of going into overtime as negotiators scramble to secure final agreements.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.N. Report on Climate Goals Says Countries Have Made No Progress

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      An annual assessment by the world body tracks the gulf between what countries have vowed to do and what they’ve actually achieved.One year after world leaders made a landmark promise to move away from fossil fuels, countries have essentially made no progress in cutting emissions and tackling global warming, according to a United Nations report issued on Thursday.Global greenhouse gas emissions soared to a record 57 gigatons last year and are not on track to decline much, if at all, this decade, the report found. Collectively, nations have been so slow to curtail their use of oil, gas and coal that it now looks unlikely that countries will be able to limit global warming to the levels they agreed to under the 2015 Paris climate agreement.“Another year passed without action means we’re worse off,” said Anne Olhoff, a climate policy expert based in Denmark and a co-author of the assessment, known as the Emissions Gap Report.The report comes a month before diplomats from around the world are scheduled to meet in Baku, Azerbaijan, for annual United Nations climate talks, where countries will discuss how they might step up efforts to address global warming.Lately, those efforts have faced huge obstacles.Even though renewable energy sources like wind and solar are growing rapidly around the world, demand for electricity has been rising even faster, which means countries are still burning more fossil fuels each year. Geopolitical conflicts, from the U.S.-China rivalry to war in places like Ukraine and Gaza, have made international cooperation on climate change harder. And rich countries have failed to keep their financial promises to help poor countries shift away from oil, gas and coal.At last year’s climate talks in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, representatives from nearly every nation approved a pact that called for “transitioning away from fossil fuels” and accelerating climate action this decade. But the agreement was vague on how to do so and on which countries should do what, and so far there has been little follow-through.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More