A week after Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, was accused of being a “wrecking ball” jeopardizing global climate talks, Saudi officials are leading an effort to block a United Nations deal to tackle plastic pollution, negotiators said.
Delegates from more than 170 nations have been engaged in tense negotiations in Busan, South Korea, to draft a global plastic treaty that addresses the growing problem of plastic waste.
Saudi Arabia, Russia and other producers of petroleum, which is used to make most of the world’s plastic, have pushed back against measures that would address plastic pollution by placing curbs on excessive plastic production. The Saudis and their allies have also said they oppose any treaty that would start to list and phase out chemicals present in plastic that are thought to be harmful to health.
In closed-door negotiations late Saturday, Saudi Arabia, along with other nations, was pushing to delete entire paragraphs from the treaty text on who should finance the costs of implementing the agreement, according to a delegate with direct knowledge of the proceedings.
Saudi delegates had argued in their submissions to the negotiations that tackling supply “penalizes industries without addressing the actual issue of plastic pollution.”
Delegates and observers have said that throughout the talks, the Saudis have insisted on unanimity for every decision and have raised frequent objections over procedure, slowing down progress.
When a Brazilian delegate who coleads a critical subgroup suggested that negotiators hold informal discussions over lunch to make up for lost time, for example, the Saudi delegate insisted that the Brazilian did not have a mandate to call for lunchtime talks, according to multiple people with knowledge of the exchange.
The Saudi delegation did not respond to requests for comment.
The slow pace has prompted rare public rebukes by delegates in Busan, where negotiations are in the final stretch. The U.N.-led talks, which kicked off in 2022, are scheduled to end on Sunday.
“We have seen countries trying to delay negotiation. This is unacceptable,” José Ramón Reyes López, a delegate for the Dominican Republic, said at a midweek session.
Mauricio Cabrera Leal, Colombia’s vice minister of environment, said a number of parties were delaying discussions. They are “leading us down a path which will not enable us to reach constructive agreement,” he said.
Neither Mr. Leal nor Mr. López specified which countries. Still, delegates aligned with the Saudis quickly responded.
Salman Alajmi, a delegate from Kuwait, said they had “gathered here in good faith” and were “fully committed” to an ambitious plastic treaty. But he said members of his bloc were “the ones being labeled as the blockers of the process when it is evidently the other way around.”
“We shouldn’t sacrifice the inclusiveness and the durability and the soundness of this agreement, just because we are pressed for time,” said Abdulrahman Al Gwaiz, a delegate from Saudi Arabia.
The fight over the future of plastics comes at a time when crude oil demand is expected to peak and then slow as the rise of electric cars starts to reduce demand for fuel. That makes plastics, which are derived from petroleum, an increasingly critical industry for oil-exporting nations.
As the world’s largest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia is especially sensitive to that transition. The kingdom’s Vision 2030, an overarching plan to diversify its economy beyond crude oil, positions petrochemicals as a promising growth industry. In its annual report, Saudi Aramco, the national oil company, lists “increased concerns regarding the safe use of chemicals and plastics and their potential impact on the environment” and the “restrictive regulations” those concerns may spur as risks to its business.
According to a U.N. attendees list, two members of the Saudi delegation are employees of the kingdom’s Oil Demand Sustainability Program, which was set up to stimulate oil demand amid an energy transition.
“They clearly have a strategy to prevent global progress on anything that would threaten their capacity to continue extracting fossil fuels,” said David Azoulay, director of environmental health at the Center for International Environmental Law.
A broad coalition of nations has stood firm on plastic production cuts, even in the face of opposition from petroleum producers, as well as the return of an oil-friendly Trump administration in the United States.
More than 100 nations have now signed onto a proposal to set a global target to reduce the production of primary plastic polymers — the building blocks of plastic. They say that to solve plastic pollution, the world needs to make less plastic, and they have emphasized that the talks have a mandate to address plastic’s full cycle, from production to disposal.
They point to the nearly half a billion tons of plastic the world produces each year, and the fact that only an estimated 9 percent of plastic waste generated globally is recycled. Researchers have estimated that one garbage truck’s worth of plastic enters the ocean every minute.
In announcing the proposal, Juan Carlos Monterrey, the head of the delegation for Panama, urged nations “that have not moved a centimeter” to cross the bridge to an agreement.
The coalition seeking to set limits on plastic production now includes fossil fuel-producing nations like Canada and Norway. It has been led by developing nations, particularly Rwanda, which in 2008 became one of the first countries in the world to ban single-use plastic bags and bottles. The United States has not signed on.
In a bid to break the stalemate, the chairman of the talks, Luis Vayas Valdivieso of Ecuador, released an updated treaty text on Friday. It still offered a binary choice: a global target to reduce plastic production, or no production curbs at all.
As delegates faced down the final hours, some raised the possibility that the talks would be suspended until a later date. Others were tentatively exploring moving the negotiations outside of a U.N. forum and away from oil-producing nations, one observer said. A third potential outcome would be a compromise that did little to address plastic pollution, they said.
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