UN Climate Talks End in Stalemate and ‘Hypocrisy’ Allegation

European governments were accused of seeking to exploit the fossil fuel reserves of the developing world while failing to help them tackle the climate crisis. The latest round of United Nations climate negotiations ended on Thursday night in a stalemate. 

Few countries have actually produced their plans for tougher emissions cuts that they promised at the Cop26 summit in November of last year. They also promised to finance and help poor countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change, which has also been severely lacking. 

How countries decide to react to the war in Ukraine and subsequent soaring costs of energy will be decisive in determining whether the world will manage to stay within the 1.5 C threshold of global warming, which is the target of limiting global heating. 

Countries can either boost renewable energy and improve energy efficiency as advised, or they will seek out even more fossil fuels. This will have an enormous effect on the future of the planet. 

Some EU member states are making plans to expand the imports of fossil fuels in order to replace the vast amounts of gas that Europe buys from Russia. 

But climate advisers and climate scientists say it’s hypocritical for Germany and other countries to source new fossil fuels abroad while denying support to developing countries from climate-induced natural disasters. 

Climate experts have called for European countries and others to ramp up climate and energy targets rather than displace oil and gas from Russia from supplies from developing countries. 

The Bonn conference ended in Berlin yesterday. It was intercessional to the annual conference of the party meetings under the UNFCCC, which is the parent treaty of the 2015 Paris agreement. It was intended to provide a bridge between last year’s COP conference and this year’s COP27, to be held in November in Egypt. 

Delegates recognized new grim scientific reports that were presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this year. The report said it is “now or never” to act on global warming.