DUBAI: Negotiators haggled to reach a compromise over the fate of fossil fuels on Tuesday as the UN climate summit went into overtime, with a Saudi-led bloc resisting a phase-out of oil, gas and coal.

Set in the glitzy Middle Eastern metropolis that was built on petrodollars, the 13-day COP28 conference has debated a historic first-ever global exit from fossil fuels, considered by scientists to be main culprits in the crisis of global warming.

But a deadline set by COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber, who himself heads the UAE’s state oil company, expired without a deal a day after he presented a draft that only listed reductions in fossil fuels among several options.

The most emotionally charged appeals for phase-out have come from low-lying islands, which fear being submerged as polar ice melts and whose teams flew to Dubai at great expense to their national budgets.

John Silk, the negotiator from the Marshall Islands, which lies on average 2.1 metres (seven feet) above sea level, said Monday that his country “did not come here to sign our death warrant”.

Vanessa Nakate, 27, a leading climate activist from Uganda, said the summit had to address fossil fuels.

“If leaders fail to address the root cause of the climate crisis after 28 years of climate conferences, then they aren’t only failing us, but they’re making us lose trust in the entire COP process,” she said.

Veteran US negotiator John Kerry has also urged stronger language on phasing out fossil fuel, even though the United States is the world’s top oil producer. But a bloc led by the Saudis is unwilling to budge. “They show forcefully that they are not willing to move,” a source told AFP.Riyadh has told COP28 to take its “concerns” into consideration while the OPEC oil cartel has urged members to resist calls to end their lucrative export.

At an energy conference in neighbouring Qatar, Kuwaiti oil minister Saad Hamad Nasser Al Barrak called the phase-out a “racist and colonial” proposal that would wreck economies in the region.

Iraq’s oil minister, Hayyan Abdul Ghani Al Sawad, said “fossil fuels will remain the major source of energy in the whole world.” The Emirati hosts put a brave face on the outrage, noting that UN rules require consensus from the nearly 200 countries at COP28.

“We need to work on how we put their views into the text in a way that everybody can be happy with,” said Majid Al Suwaidi, COP28 director general.

The text, he said, offered “honest, practical, pragmatic conversations about where people’s red lines really were”.

Seeking to force decisions, the Emiratis had urged a deal before the summit’s official close Tuesday morning, but Suwaidi said after the deadline that the priority was to “get the most ambitious outcome possible”.

Published in Dawn, December 13th, 2023