SAUDI CLIMATE RECORD IN SPOTLIGHT AT UN SUMMIT

Katowice: Saudi Arabia’s refusal to embrace landmark environmental data highlighting the need for drastic fossil fuel cuts is part of a long history of hostility to climate action from the world’s largest oil exporter, delegates and observers at UN climate talks told AFP. Negotiations between nearly 200 nations aimed at charting mankind’s path away from runaway global warming were thrown into tumult at the weekend when Saudi Arabia, along with the United States, Russia and Kuwait refused to “welcome” the findings of an UN body that laid out the threats posed by climate change in the starkest terms yet.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in October concluded that worldwide greenhouse gas emissions must be slashed by nearly half within 12 years to retain any hope of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

That is the safer cap that countries agreed in the 2015 Paris accord, and the COP24 climate talks due to end Friday in the Polish mining city of Katowice are supposed to produce a rule book on how nations achieve this. Riyadh’s Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih issued a statement Wednesday reaffirming “the kingdom’s commitment to the Paris agreement”.

But representatives of smaller nations imperilled by rising seas alleged that Saudi Arabia and its allies were, in fact, “buying time” for fossil fuels at the expense of the planet. Ralph Regenvanu, foreign minister of Vanuatu -- a nation already dealing with the extreme weather and rising seas made worse by our warming planet -- accused the bloc of negotiating the Paris rule book in bad faith.