World leaders used two days of speeches at the COP31 climate talks in Antalya, Turkey, to stake out competing demands, leaving negotiators to hunt for a deal everyone can accept, Reuters reported in Al-Monitor.
The tension is a later-day snapshot of a summit that opened earlier this week without a U.S. delegation. Small-island states, among the most exposed to sea-level rise, pleaded for urgent cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. European leaders lined up behind a plan to expand global electrification. Developing countries asked rich nations for more climate finance. Fossil-fuel producers said oil, gas and coal should continue to be used.
"We reaffirm our sovereign right to strengthen our energy and oil industry as a driver of our national development," Venezuela's acting President Delcy Rodriguez told the conference, after U.N. leaders had argued for ending the fossil-fuel age, Reuters reported.
What a deal would have to navigate
Host Turkey and negotiations lead Australia also face a political climate in which wars and inflation have pushed climate down the agenda. "It's my job to steer consensus, not to bang tables and demand any particular action, but to steer consensus to the strongest, most ambitious possible outcome within the constraints of that consensus-driven process," Australia's Chris Bowen, the COP31 president of negotiations, told Reuters. Asked what a good deal might look like, he said: "I have many more hours of consultations with partners to do."
A U.N. report last month found the world was already on course to break through the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming limit countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris Agreement, Reuters reported.
On Thursday, the Guardian reported, Climate Action Tracker found current policies are set to heat the planet by 2.7C by the end of the century — slightly more than the group expected last year and well above the 1.5C target. Campaigners have criticized governments for slow emissions cuts and for failing so far to rally around a fossil-fuel phaseout in the talks.
Burnham, islands and a warning from Thunberg
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham backed a Turkish proposal to raise electricity's share of world energy consumption to 35% by 2035, from a little over a fifth now, both Reuters and the Guardian reported. Turkey has not specified whether the extra electricity would be renewable. The Guardian said some countries want the agreement text to specify that the power come from clean sources. Burnham told the conference that energy-supply disruptions from the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and Russia's war with Ukraine showed clean energy was the wise choice.
Beth John, a climate-justice adviser at Oxfam GB, told the Guardian that Burnham's appearance "sends a positive signal," but added that "showing up is not enough" and that "the real test of climate leadership is delivery, not declarations."
Leaders of small-island states including the Bahamas, Tuvalu, the Solomon Islands and Saint Lucia called for swift action. "Major emitters must move beyond the usual promises. They must reduce emissions that the climate crisis demands," Saint Lucia's Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre said, according to Reuters.
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, speaking on the sidelines, was blistering. "The situation could not be less under control. The planet is not dying. It is being killed," she said, according to Reuters and the Guardian. "It is being killed by the very same people often thought to come to our rescue. No one is coming to our rescue."
Thursday was also filled with accounts of recent damage. Nepal's environment minister, Gita Chaudhary, told the Guardian about an August landslide caused by a melting glacier that she said claimed more than 1,500 lives. "We call the catastrophic climate change event we suffered a mountain tsunami," she said. "We lost people, we lost lives, we lost property. ... But the communities, the culture, the lives, we cannot revive."