A row has broken out at COP29 climate talks as leading countries said a draft deal risked going back on a historic agreement to reduce the use of planet-warming fossil fuels.
“Standing still is retreat and the world will rightly judge us very harshly if this is the outcome,” said UK energy minister Ed Miliband.
The UK, European Union, New Zealand and Ireland said the proposed agreement was “unacceptable”.
Developing nations said they are unhappy that a pot of money has not been agreed to help them tackle climate change.
Nearly 200 countries are meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan to try to decide on the next steps in tackling climate change.
The row comes as the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned countries that “failure is not an option”.
At the heart of the talks is a trade-off between promises of more money from developed nations and global pledges to reduce the use of fossil fuels.
Some developing nations and oil-rich countries are reluctant to push strong action on cutting fossil fuels because it could jeopardise their economic growth.
In an open meeting of all nations, the EU Commissioner for Climate Action Wopke Hoekstra called the draft deal “unbalanced, unworkable and unsubtle”.
US Climate Envoy John Podesta said: “We are surprised that there is nothing that carries forward…what we agreed last year in Dubai.”
“We will have failed in our duty and the millions of people already feeling the effects of extreme weather,” he added.
Samoan minister Cedric Schuster, representing small island nations on the front-line of climate change, said:
“We cannot afford to undermine the progress achieved less than a year ago in Dubai”.
At the COP28 climate
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