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US receives stinging criticism at Cop27 despite China’s growing emissions | Cop27

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The US, fresh from reversing its 30 years of opposition to a “loss and damage” fund for poorer countries suffering the worst impacts of the climate crisis, has signaled that its longstanding image as global climate villain should now be pinned on a new culprit: China.

Following years of tumult in which the US refused to provide anything resembling compensation for climate damages, followed by Donald Trump’s removal of the US from the Paris climate agreement, there was a profound shift at the Cop27 UN talks in Egypt, with Joe Biden’s administration agreeing to the new loss and damage fund.

The US also backed language in the new agreement, which finally concluded in the early hours of Sunday morning after an often fraught period of negotiations between governments, that would demand the phase-out of all unabated fossil fuels, only to be thwarted by major oil-producing nations such as Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Despite these stances, the US continued to be the leading target of ire from climate activists who blame it for obstruction and for failing to reckon with its role as history’s largest ever emitter of planet-heating gases. On Friday, the US was given the unwanted title of “colossal fossil” by climate groups for supposedly failing to push through the loss and damage assistance at Cop27.

The US US delegation in Sharm el-Sheikh chafed at this image, with John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, using his closing remarks to shift the focus on to China, now the world’s largest emitter. Kerry said that “all nations have a stake in the choices China makes in this critical decade. The United States and China should be able to accelerate progress together, not only for our sake, but for future generations – and we are all hopeful that China will live up to its global responsibility.”

Kerry and his team were by the end of the talks “sick” of shouldering the blame, according to Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser, now with the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington DC. “Somehow the US became the villain despite aggressive action on emissions, meanwhile Russia and China’s emissions are growing like crazy and yet they are not in the crosshairs of activists, it’s confusing,” he said.

“I mean it’s absurd. If we don’t get hold of China’s emissions the climate will spin out of control.”

Nate Hultman, who was part of Kerry’s negotiating team for Cop26 last year, said the US entered the climate talks “with its head held high” after Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act over the summer, which included more than $370bn (£313bn) in spending to advance renewable energy and electric cars. “The US is acting as one of the key leaders in getting the climate outcome the world wants, I just reject this caricature of the US being obstructionist,” he said.

The US and China, the world’s two largest emitters, had been in a sort of diplomatic deep freeze on climate issues following the visit of Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, to Taiwan in August. Cop27 saw the beginnings of a thaw in this relationship, with the overlapping G20 summit resulting in Biden resuming dialogue with Xi Jinping.

China’s emissions are now nearly three times as large as America’s and while it has become the pre-eminent renewable energy superpower, it is ramping up its use of coal at a rate that scientists say will push the world disastrously beyond 1.5C in global heating. “Our planet is still in the emergency room,” said António Guterres, secretary general of the UN, on the lack of progress in cutting emissions in the Cop27 deal.

“We need to drastically reduce emissions now and this is an issue this Cop did not address. The world still needs a giant leap on climate ambition.”

China, and many climate activists, point to America’s long history of being the lead carbon polluter and its failure to honor past commitments on climate finance to developing countries strafed by heatwaves, droughts, floods and other impacts. Biden has promised $11bn (£9bn) for this effort, although this spending will probably be blocked by the House of Representatives when it falls under Republican control in January, barring a last-gasp funding deal before Christmas.

“A quarter of the CO2 in our atmosphere is red, white and blue,” said Ed Markey, a Democratic senator who visited the Cop27 summit. “The United States has a moral and planetary responsibility to partner, not prohibit, on equitable climate finance. We cannot leave the countries least responsible for the climate crisis to be sacrifice zones and bear this horrific burden alone.”

The summit also saw criticism of a glut of new oil and gas projects in the US, Biden’s call for a short-term leap in oil production to help bring down gasoline prices that have spiked following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a new carbon-trading scheme announced by Kerry.

The carbon offsets “will only further condemn the African continent and global south nations to a future of pollution and environmental chaos, all for the benefit of the fossil fuel industry and big business,” according to Ozawa Bineshi Albert, co-executive director of the Climate Justice Alliance.

Back at home, Biden will face pressure from activists to declare a climate emergency to bypass Republican intransigence and to curb the leases still being liberally handed out for oil and gas drilling. The focus of the president on climate, however, will be “China, China, China”, according to Bledsoe.

“That is the only game in town, we’ve got to get Beijing to bend its emissions downwards, whatever it takes, even if it’s carbon border tariffs,” he said. “No matter what, that’s the priority of Biden. If you want to blame two groups for the climate impasse, blame communist China and America’s Republican party. That’s the truth of it.”

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World

COP27 delivers climate fund breakthrough at cost of progress on emissions

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  • COP27 climate summit ends after marathon weekend negotiations
  • Final deal delivers on creating historic climate finance fund
  • Negotiators say some blocked tighter emissions targets

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 20 (Reuters) – Countries closed this year’s U.N. climate summit on Sunday with a hard-fought deal to create a fund to help poor countries being battered by climate disasters, even as many lamented its lack of ambition in tackling the emissions causing them.

The deal was widely lauded as a triumph for responding to the devastating impact that global warming is already having on vulnerable countries. But many countries said they felt pressured to give up on tougher commitments for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in order for the landmark deal on the loss and damage fund to go through.

Delegates – worn out after intense, overnight negotiations – made no objections as Egypt’s COP27 President Sameh Shoukry rattled through the final agenda items and gavelled the deal through.

Despite having no agreement for a stronger commitment to the 1.5 C goal set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, “we went with what the agreement was here because we want to stand with the most vulnerable,” Germany’s climate secretary Jennifer Morgan, visibly shaken, told Reuters.

When asked by Reuters whether the goal of stronger climate-fighting ambition had been compromised for the deal, Mexico’s chief climate negotiator Camila Zepeda summed up the mood among exhausted negotiators.

“Probably. You take a win when you can.”

LOSS AND DAMAGE

The deal for a loss and damage fund marked a diplomatic coup for small islands and other vulnerable nations in winning over the 27-nation European Union and the United States, which had long resisted the idea for fear that such a fund could open them to legal liability for historic emissions.

Those concerns were assuaged with language in the agreement calling for the funds to come from a variety of existing sources, including financial institutions, rather than relying on rich nations to pay in.

The climate envoy from the Marshall Islands said she was “worn out” but happy with the fund’s approval. “So many people all this week told us we wouldn’t get it,” Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner said. “So glad they were wrong.”

But it likely will be several years before the fund exists, with the agreement setting out only a roadmap for resolving lingering questions including who would oversee the fun, how the money would be dispersed – and to whom.

U.S. special climate envoy John Kerry, who was not at the weekend negotiations in person after testing positive for COVID-19, on Sunday welcomed the deal to “establish arrangements to respond to the devastating impact of climate change on vulnerable communities around the world.”

In a statement, he said he would continue to press major emitters like China to “significantly enhance their ambition” in keeping the 1.5 C goal alive.

FOSSIL FUEL FIZZLE

[1/7] A screen shows COP27 President Sameh Shoukry delivering a statement during the closing plenary at the COP27 climate summit in Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, November 20, 2022. REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El Ghany

The price paid for a deal on the loss and damage fund was most evident in the language around emission reductions and reducing the use of polluting fossil fuels – known in the parlance of U.N. climate negotiations as “mitigation.”

Last year’s COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, had focused on a theme of keeping the 1.5C goal alive – as scientists warn that warming beyond that threshold would see climate change spiral to extremes.

Countries were asked then to update their national climate targets before this year’s Egypt summit. Only a fraction of the nearly 200 parties did so.

While praising the loss and damage deal, many countries decried COP27’s failure to push mitigation further and said some countries were trying to roll back commitments made in the Glasgow Climate Pact.

“We had to fight relentlessly to hold the line of Glasgow,” a visibly frustrated Alok Sharma, architect of the Glasgow deal, told the summit.

He listed off a number of ambition-boosting measures that were stymied in the negotiations for the final COP27 deal in Egypt: “Emissions peaking before 2025 as the science tells us is necessary? Not in this text. Clear follow-through on the phase down of coal? Not in this text. A clear commitment to phase out all fossil fuels? Not in this text.”

On fossil fuels, the COP27 deal text largely repeats wording from Glasgow, calling up parties to accelerate “efforts towards the phasedown of unabated coal power and phase-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.”

Efforts to include a commitment to phase out, or at least phase down, all fossil fuels were thwarted.

A separate “mitigation work programme” agreement, also approved on Sunday, contained several clauses that some parties, including the European Union, felt weakened commitment to ever more ambitious emissions-cutting targets.

Critics pointed to a section which they said undermined the Glasgow commitment to regularly renew emissions targets – with language saying the work programme would “not impose new targets or goals”. Another section of the COP27 deal dropped the idea of annual target renewal in favour of returning to a longer five-year cycle set out in the Paris pact.

“It is more than frustrating to see overdue steps on mitigation and the phase-out of fossil energies being stonewalled by a number of large emitters and oil producers,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said.

The deal also included a reference to “low-emissions energy,” raising concern among some that it opened the door to the growing use of natural gas – a fossil fuel that leads to both carbon dioxide and methane emissions.

“It does not break with Glasgow completely, but it doesn’t raise ambition at all,” Norway’s Climate Minister Espen Barth Eide told reporters.

The climate minister of the Maldives, which faces future inundation from climate-driven sea level rise, lamented the lack of ambition on curbing emissions.

“I recognise the progress we made in COP27” with the loss and damage fund, Aminath Shauna told the plenary. But “we have failed on mitigation … We have to ensure that we increase ambition to peak emissions by 2025. We have to phase out fossil fuel.”

Reporting by Valerie Volcovici, Dominic Evans and William James; Writing by Katy Daigle

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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World

COP27 deal does little to avert future climate change disasters

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SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt — The final decision of the U.N. Climate Conference on Sunday yielded a breakthrough in addressing the hazards already ravaging the planet but made little progress on emissions-cutting measures that could avert even worse disasters to come.

It was a double-edged outcome to negotiations that at times seemed on the brink of failure, as many wealthy nations argued for deeper, faster climate action and poorer countries said they first needed help dealing with the consequences of warming fueled mostly by the industrialized world.

Even as diplomats and activists applauded the creation of a fund to support vulnerable countries after disasters, many worried that nations’ reluctance to adopt more ambitious climate plans had left the planet on a dangerous warming path.

“Too many parties are not ready to make more progress today in the fight against the climate crisis,” European Union climate chief Frans Timmermans told weary negotiators Sunday morning. “What we have in front of us is not enough of a step forward for people and planet.”

The equivocal agreement, reached after a year of record-setting climate disasters and weeks of fraught negotiations in Egypt, underscores the challenge of getting the whole world to agree on rapid climate action when many powerful countries and organizations remain invested in the current energy system.

U.N. negotiators reach deal to help vulnerable nations with climate disasters

Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University and chair of the Global Carbon Project, said it’s inevitable the world will surpass what scientists consider a safe warming threshold. The only questions are by how much and how many people will suffer as a result?

“It isn’t just COP27, it’s the lack of action at all the other COPs since the Paris accord,” Jackson said. “We’ve been bleeding for years now.”

He blamed entrenched interests, as well as political leaders and general human apathy, for delaying action toward the most ambitious goal set in Paris in 2015 of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.

An analysis by the advocacy group Global Witness showed a record number of fossil fuel lobbyists among attendees at this year’s conference. Multiple world leaders, including this year’s Egyptian COP hosts, held events with industry representatives and spoke about natural gas as a “transition fuel” that could ease the shift to renewable energy. Though burning gas produces fewer emissions than burning coal, the production and transportation process can lead to leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

In closed-door consultations, diplomats from Saudi Arabia and other oil- and gas-producing countries pushed back against proposals that would allow for nations to set new and more frequent emissions-cutting targets and call for a phaseout of all polluting fossil fuels, according to multiple people with knowledge of the negotiations.

“We went into the mitigation workshop, and it was five hours of trench warfare,” said New Zealand Climate Minister James Shaw, referring to discussions over a program designed to help countries meet their climate pledges and curb emissions across economic sectors. “It was hard work just to hold the line.”

Humanity’s current climate efforts are wildly insufficient to avoid catastrophic climate change. A study published midway through the COP27 negotiations found that few nations have followed through on a requirement from last year’s conference to boost their emissions-cutting pledges, and the world is on the precipice of warming well beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius — crossing a threshold that scientists say will lead to collapse of ecosystems, escalating extreme weather and widespread hunger and disease.

World has nine years to avert catastrophic warming, study shows

Sunday’s deal also fails to reflect the scientific reality, described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this year, that the world must rapidly reduce its dependence on coal, oil and gas. Though an unprecedented number of countries — including India, the United States and the European Union — called for language on the need to phase out all polluting fossil fuels, the overarching decision only reiterated last year’s pact in Glasgow on the need for a “phase-down of unabated coal power.”

“It’s a consensus process,” said Shaw, whose country also backed the fossil fuel phaseout language. “If there’s a group of countries who are like, we will not stand for that, it’s very hard to get it done.”

Yet the historic agreement on a fund for irreversible climate harms — known in U.N. parlance as “loss and damage” — also showed how the COP process can empower the world’s smallest and most vulnerable countries.

Many observers believed the United States and other industrialized nations would never make such a financial commitment out of fear of liability for the trillions of dollars in damage that climate change will cause.

But after catastrophic floods left half of Pakistan underwater this year, the country’s diplomats led a negotiating block of more than 130 developing nations in demanding that “funding arrangements for loss and damage” be added to the meeting agenda.

“If there is any sense of morality and equity in international affairs … then there should be solidarity with the people of Pakistan and the people who are affected by the climate crisis,” Pakistani negotiator Munir Akram said in the early days of the conference. “This is a matter of climate justice.”

Resistance from wealthy countries began to soften as developing country leaders made clear they would not leave without a loss-and-damage fund. As talks stretched into overtime on Saturday, diplomats from small island states met with European Union negotiators to broker the deal that nations ultimately agreed on.

Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, said the success of that effort gave her optimism that countries could also do more to prevent future warming — something that’s necessary to keep her tiny Pacific nation from vanishing into rising seas.

“We’ve shown with the loss-and-damage fund that we can do the impossible,” she said, “so we know we can come back next year and get rid of fossil fuels once and for all.”

And Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy for Climate Action Network International, saw another benefit of requiring payment for climate harms: “COP27 has sent a warning shot to polluters that they can no longer go scot free with their climate destruction,” he said.

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What are the key outcomes of Cop27 climate summit? | Cop27

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Loss and damage

Developing countries have been seeking financial assistance for loss and damage – money needed to rescue and rebuild the physical and social infrastructure of countries devastated by extreme weather – for nearly three decades. Finally achieving agreement on a fund is a major milestone. Now comes the difficult part – the fund must be set up, and filled with cash. There is no agreement yet on how the finance should be provided and where it should come from.

1.5C

The 2015 Paris agreement contained two temperature goals – to keep the rise “well below 2C” above pre-industrial levels, and “pursuing efforts” to keep the increase to 1.5C. Science since then has shown clearly that 2C is not safe, so at Cop26 in Glasgow last year countries agreed to focus on a 1.5C limit. As their commitments on cutting greenhouse gas emissions were too weak to stay within the 1.5C limit, they also agreed to return each year to strengthen them, a process known as the ratchet. At Cop27, some countries tried to renege on the 1.5C goal, and to abolish the ratchet. They failed, but a resolution to cause emissions to peak by 2025 was taken out, to the dismay of many.

Gas

The final text of Cop27 contained a provision to boost “low-emissions energy”. That could mean many things, from wind and solar farms to nuclear reactors, and coal-fired power stations fitted with carbon capture and storage. It could also be interpreted to mean gas, which has lower emissions than coal, but is still a major fossil fuel. Many countries at Cop27, particularly those from Africa with large reserves to exploit, came to Sharm el-Sheikh hoping to strike lucrative gas deals.

Fossil fuels

Last year at Glasgow, a commitment to phase down the use of coal was agreed. It marked the first time a resolution on fossil fuels had been included in the final text – some would say, incredibly for 30 years of conferences on climate change. At Cop27, some countries – led by India – wanted to go further and include a commitment to phase down all fossil fuels. That was the subject of intense wrangling late into Saturday night, but in the end it failed and the resolution included was the same as that in Glasgow.

World Bank reform

A growing number of developed and developing countries are calling for urgent changes to the World Bank and other publicly funded finance institutions, which they say have failed to provide the funding needed to help poor countries cut their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of the climate crisis. Reform of the kind widely discussed at Cop27 could involve a recapitalisation of the development banks to allow them to provide far more assistance to the developing world. Nicholas Stern, a climate economist and peer, has calculated the developing world will need $2.4tn (£2tn) a year from 2030. But this is only about 5% more than the investment they would require anyway, much of which would go into high-carbon infrastructure. The World Bank could provide about half of those funds, he estimates.

Adaptation

Building flood defences, preserving wetlands, restoring mangrove swamps and regrowing forests – these measures, and more, can help countries to become more resilient to the impacts of climate breakdown. But poor countries often struggle to gain funding for these efforts. Of the $100bn a year rich countries promised they would receive from 2020 – a promise still not fulfilled – only about $20bn goes to adaptation. In Glasgow, countries agreed to double that proportion, but at Cop27 some sought to remove that commitment. After some struggle, it was reaffirmed.

Tipping points, the IPCC and health

Since Cop26, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has published the key parts of its latest vast assessment of climate science, warning of catastrophic impacts that can only be averted by sharp and urgent cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. The IPCC was set up by the UN to advise on science, yet some countries wished to remove references to its latest findings from the final text. Instead of that, a reference to the key finding of “tipping points” was put in – a warning that the climate does not warm in a gradual and linear fashion, but that we risk tripping feedback loops that will lead to rapidly escalating effects. These include the heating of the Amazon, which could turn the rainforest to savannah, transforming it from a carbon sink to a carbon source, and the melting of permafrost that releases the powerful greenhouse gas methane. Also inserted was a reference to “the right to a clean healthy and sustainable environment”. Medical professionals have begun to play a much more prominent role in climate talks, and in climate protests, drawing a clear link between global heating and health.

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COP27: Negotiators reach tentative deal on ‘loss and damage’ at UN climate summit

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Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt
CNN
 — 

Despite one major breakthrough on Saturday, international climate negotiations at the UN’s COP27 climate summit are dragging on into early Sunday morning.

The closing plenary of this year’s COP is scheduled to start at 3 a.m. Egypt time, according to a notice from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

For the second year in a row, marathon negotiations continued well past their scheduled end, as countries attempted to hammer out stronger language around phasing down all fossil fuels including oil and gas, instead of just unabated coal, according to multiple NGOs observing the talks.

Elsewhere, progress has been made. On Saturday, parties reached a tentative agreement to establish a “loss and damage” fund for nations vulnerable to climate disasters, according to negotiators with the European Union and Africa, as well as non-governmental organizations who are observing the talks.

The United States is also working to sign on to a deal on a loss and damage fund, Whitney Smith, a spokesperson for US Climate Envoy John Kerry, confirmed to CNN.

The fund will focus on what can be done to support loss and damage resources, but it does not include liability or compensation provisions, a senior Biden administration official told CNN. The US and other developed nations have long sought to avoid such provisions that could open them up to legal liability and lawsuits from other countries.

If finalized, this could represent a major breakthrough in negotiations on a contentious subject – and it’s seen as a reversal, as the US has in the past opposed efforts to create such a fund.

All is not yet settled – an EU source directly involved with the negotiations cautioned earlier Saturday that the deal is part of the larger COP27 agreement that has to be approved by nearly 200 countries. Negotiators worked through the night into Sunday. And other issues, including language around fossil fuels, remain, according to multiple NGOs observing the talks.

But progress has been made, the source said. In a discussion Saturday afternoon Egypt time, the EU managed to get the G77 bloc of countries to agree to target the fund to vulnerable nations, which could pave the way to a deal on loss and damage.

If finalized, the deal would represent a major breakthrough on the international stage and far exceed the expectations of this year’s climate summit, and the mood among some of the delegates was jubilant.

Countries who are the most vulnerable to climate disasters – yet who have contributed little to the climate crisis – have struggled for years to secure a loss and damage fund.

Developed nations that have historically produced the most planet-warming emissions have been hesitant to sign off on a fund they felt could open them up to legal liability for climate disasters.

Details on how the fund would operate remain murky. The tentative text says a fund will be established this year, but it leaves a lot of questions on when it will be finalized and become operational, climate experts told reporters Saturday. The text talks about a transitional committee that will help nail down those details, but doesn’t set future deadlines.

“There are no guarantees to the timeline,” Nisha Krishnan resilience director for World Resources Institute Africa told reporters.

Advocates for a loss and damage fund were happy with the progress, but noted that the draft is not ideal.

“We are happy with this outcome because it’s what developed countries wanted – though not everything they came here for,” Erin Roberts, founder of the Loss and Damage Collaboration, told CNN in a statement. “Like many, I’ve also been conditioned to expect very little from this process. While establishing the fund is certainly a win for developing countries and those on the frontlines of climate change, it’s an empty shell without finance. It’s far too little, far too late for those on the frontlines of climate change. But we will work on it.”

At COP27 the demand for a loss and damage fund – from developing countries, the G77 bloc and activists – had reached a fever pitch, driven by a number of major climate disasters this year including Pakistan’s devastating floods.

The conference first went into overtime on Saturday before continuing into the early hours of Sunday morning, with negotiators still working out the details as the workers were dismantling the venue around them. At points, there was a real sense of fatigue and frustration. Complicating matters was the fact that Kerry – the top US climate official – is self-isolating after recently testing positive for Covid, working the phones instead of having face-to-face meetings.

And earlier in the day Saturday, EU officials threatened to walk out of the meeting if the final agreement fails to endorse the goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Global scientists have for decades warned that warming must be limited to 1.5 degrees – a threshold that is fast-approaching as the planet’s average temperature has already climbed to around 1.1 degrees. Beyond 1.5 degrees, the risk of extreme drought, wildfires, floods and food shortages will increase dramatically, scientists said in the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

In a carefully choreographed news conference Saturday morning, the EU’s Green Deal tsar Frans Timmermans, flanked by a full line-up of ministers and other top officials from EU member states, said that “no deal is better than a bad deal.”

“We do not want 1.5 Celsius to die here and today. That to us is completely unacceptable,” he said.

The EU made it clear that it was willing to agree to a loss and damage fund – a major shift in its position compared to just a week ago – but only in exchange for a strong commitment on the 1.5 degree goal.

As the sun went down on Sharm el-Sheikh Saturday evening, the mood shifted to cautious jubilation, with groups of negotiators starting to hint that a deal was in sight.

But, as is always the case with top-level diplomacy, officials were quick to stress that nothing is truly agreed until the final gavel drops.

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World

John Kerry tests positive for Covid-19 at COP27 as negotiations head into overtime

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CNN
 — 

With just hours left to go to reach an international climate agreement, US climate envoy John Kerry has tested positive for Covid-19 at the United Nations’ COP27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, his spokesperson Whitney Smith said.

Smith said in a statement that Kerry is “experiencing mild symptoms” and self-isolating at the summit. As the talks hit a critical stretch, he is “working with his negotiations team and foreign counterparts by phone to ensure a successful outcome of COP27.”

It is bad timing for the chief US climate negotiator to fall ill; the final Friday at the annual summit is always crunch time for negotiators to reach a deal that nearly 200 nations can agree to. But this year the issues are particularly thorny – the US represents a major holdout on the critical issue of a loss and damage fund, which would help the world’s developing and most vulnerable countries recover from climate disasters they did little to cause.

Loss and damage is not the only outstanding issue. World leaders at COP27 are also frantically trying to hash out a deal that would safeguard the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

Just hours before the Sharm el-Sheikh summit was officially due to end on Friday – and as the conference venue was being dismantled around negotiators – this year’s COP president Sameh Shoukry said he was “concerned” by the summit’s lack of progress so far.

“I remain concerned at the number of outstanding issues including on finance, mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage and their inter-linkages,” Shoukry told the conference.

“Today, we need to shift gears again. Time is not on our side,” he added.

The Egyptian COP presidency has taken a relaxed approach to Covid-19 at the conference. The organizers did not require participants to be vaccinated or show a negative Covid-19 test when registering, although they “strongly recommended” that attendees be up-to-date with their vaccinations before arriving.

Masks, too, were wholly optional and rare to spot inside the venue – although the number of people wearing them increased noticeably over the past few days.

As the number of people who tested positive grew and the news of a potential outbreak started to spread, more attendees began to mask up. Still, even on Friday, as news of Kerry’s positive test broke, most people remained without masks.

The Chinese delegation stood out by strictly requiring anyone who wanted to step foot inside the country’s pavilion to mask up and sanitize their hands.

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Cop27 talks continue over EU climate loss and damage fund proposal | Cop27

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Crucial climate talks have dragged on past their deadline with no end in sight, as governments wrangle over how to pay for the rebuilding of poor countries ravaged by climate breakdown.

There was turmoil in the negotiating halls of the Cop27 UN summit in Egypt. Delegates rushed from room to room as countries scrambled to decide their response to a last-ditch proposal from the European Union that would establish a new fund providing cash for countries suffering climate-related disaster, known as loss and damage.

Such a fund has been the core demand of developing countries during the two weeks of these negotiations. The EU offer was announced early in the day. By late on Friday night, a piece of informal proposed text backed by the EU, the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand was circulated to delegates.

Seen by the Guardian, the proposal included a fund to be made operational within two years, and options for a commission to be set up that would examine whether it could work in concert with other existing financial institutions, such as the World Bank.

Developing country groupings were considering the proposal late into the night.

Frans Timmermans, vice-president of the European Commission, had earlier said EU member states would only provide cash if “the donor base was broadened”.

That means expecting payments – and tougher targets on cutting greenhouse gases – from countries such as China, the world’s biggest emitter and second-biggest economy, as well as high emitters with vast oil revenues such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, and potentially from rapidly industrialising nations such as South Korea and Singapore.

Those countries have all been classed as “developing” since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, parent treaty to the Paris agreement, was signed in 1992. That has meant they have been absolved from contributing to climate finance for the vulnerable, and many have lax targets on cutting emissions.

But in the past 30 years, their emissions and economies have ballooned. China’s cumulative emissions are now second only to those of the US, while Russia, India, Indonesia and Brazil are also in the top 10.

The draft proposal calls for “a wide variety of parties and sources” to contribute money, and to “expand sources of funding”, but does not specify that large emerging economies such as China must contribute cash.

China did not respond to requests for a response earlier on Friday. Last week, the country’s climate chief, Xie Zhenhua, indicated that China did not face an obligation to pay for loss and damage in vulnerable countries.

“We strongly support the concerns from developing countries, especially the most vulnerable countries, for addressing loss and damage because China is also a developing country and we also suffered a lot from extreme weather events,” he said, through a translator. “It is not the obligation of China to provide financial support under the UNFCCC.”

Some vulnerable nations warmly welcomed the EU proposal. Seve Paeniu, finance minister for the low-lying Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, said it was a “major breakthrough”. Vanuatu and Palau took similar positions. “To me, that is a major concession,” Paeniu said. “It is our hope that it will be ending up in the text of the conference decision.”

Others gave a muted or ambivalent response to the EU proposal, even though they had been calling for the establishment of a loss and damage fund. Many poorer developing countries have traditionally sought to present a united front with China, which has offered investment to economies in Africa, Latin America and south-east Asia.

Carla Barnett, secretary general of the Caribbean Community group of countries, said: “There’s only one option for small island developing states, a financing fund that delivers a just pathway for the future of our countries. Division and delay tactics will not work. This is a matter we defend on the basis of justice.”

Many others would not respond officially, but the Guardian understands that some are pleased with the EU proposal but will not speak out for fear of angering their allies. Civil society activists and some countries accused the EU of trying to create division in the developing world.

Mohamed Adow, director of the Power Shift Africa thinktank, said: “The fund shouldn’t be used as a poison pill to fix old divisions around expanding the donor base. [This] won’t meet the needs of vulnerable countries.”

One negotiator for the G77 plus China alliance told the Guardian: “It is a predictable attempt by the EU to break up the G77 in talks. Of course, it’s not a breakthrough. It’s completely disingenuous.”

Timmermans denied those claims. “I’m doing this for my kids,” he said. “We can’t afford to have a failure. If our steps forward are not reciprocated by others, there will be a failure. I hope that can be avoided.”

Meanwhile John Kerry, Joe Biden’s special envoy for climate, began self-isolating on Friday night after testing positive for Covid. He had been closely engaged in the negotiations and although he will continue to negotiate by phone, the news comes as a blow as talks between Kerry and his Chinese counterpart, Xie, were considered by some as a potential way of breaking the deadlock.

A state department spokesperson said: “Secretary Kerry is self-isolating after testing positive for Covid-19 in Sharm el-Sheikh. He is fully vaccinated and boosted and experiencing mild symptoms. He is working with his negotiations team and foreign counterparts by phone to ensure a successful outcome of Cop27.”

As well as the EU proposal, the frantic last official day of the fortnight-long talks saw:

  • The final publication of the revised draft text for a “cover decision” from the conference of the parties, cut down from 20 pages in its original version to 10, and including commitments to increase the funding to help developing countries adapt to the impacts of extreme weather.

  • Fears of countries attempting to backslide on the target of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Some language in the draft text emphasised the upper limit of 2C from the Paris agreement, which scientists have shown would bring dangerous levels of extreme weather and inundate small islands.

  • India appearing to have failed in its attempt to have a commitment to phase down all fossil fuels included in the outcome of the conference, which was missing from the draft.

  • The Egyptian hosts coming under fire as delegates worried that the talks were progressing too slowly, with the negotiating timetable still unclear and an endpoint not yet in sight as the official deadline of 6pm local time for the end of the conference passed.

  • Calls for reform of the World Bank included in the draft text, to the relief of many countries that have made it a key aim at these talks.

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Cop27: Biden says leaders ‘can no longer plead ignorance’ over climate crisis | Cop27

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Joe Biden has implored countries to do more to tackle the climate emergency, telling the Cop27 summit that world leaders “can no longer plead ignorance” and that time to confront the crisis is running out.

Biden told a large crowd of delegates at the talks, held in Egypt, that the “science is devastatingly clear – we have to make progress by the end of this decade.” The US president stated that America was taking action on cutting planet-heating emissions and that other major economies needed to “step up” to avoid a disastrous breach of 1.5C in global heating.

“Let’s raise both our ambition and speed of our efforts,” he said in his speech on Friday in Sharm el-Sheikh. “If we are going to win this fight, every major emitter needs to align with 1.5C. We can no longer plead ignorance of the consequences of our actions or continue to repeat our mistakes. Everyone has to keep accelerating progress throughout this decisive decade.”

Biden, buoyed by better than expected midterm election results for Democrats this week, said that governments need to “put down significant markers of progress” in reducing emissions. Scientists have warned that the world is heading for disastrous levels of global heating, with emissions still not falling fast enough to avoid severe heatwaves, wildfires, droughts and other impacts of the climate crisis.

“It’s been a difficult few years; the interconnected challenges we face can seem all-consuming,” said Biden, who accused Vladimir Putin of using “energy as a weapon” in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an action that has caused energy and food prices to soar globally. “Against this backdrop, it’s more urgent than ever that we double down on our climate commitment.”

Biden, who was briefly interrupted by a small band of whooping climate protesters, said the US was committed to helping developing countries hurt worst by climate impacts but did not mention providing payments via “loss and damage”, the hot topic of Cop27 and the most pressing issue for vulnerable communities already suffering from worsening catastrophes.

The protesters were youth and Indigenous activists from the US, calling on Biden to stop pushing fossil fuel extraction. “The president, members of congress and the state department have come to this international forum on climate change proposing false solutions that will not get us to 1.5 degrees,” said Big Wind, 29, member of the Northern Arapaho tribe in Wyoming.

“We need to accelerate the transition but that’s not going to happen by partnering with big polluters like Amazon and PepsiCo, and so we needed to call that out,” he said, in reference to an announcement earlier this week by US climate envoy John Kerry, the Bezos Earth Fund, and PepsiCo among others about plans to design an Energy Transition Accelerator.

Biden used the speech to unveil a number of new measures, including a plan to slash emissions of methane in the US, support new early warning systems for extreme weather disasters in Africa and a deal to back new solar and wind projects in Egypt in return for the country decommissioning gas power plants and cutting its emissions.

The standout pledge made by Biden is the plan to reduce methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that routinely leaks from oil and gas drilling operations, the burning of gas itself and from agriculture. Methane doesn’t last as long in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide but traps 80 times more heat, on average, in the 20 years after it is emitted.

The new methane cuts could be undercut elsewhere. A slew of new gas projects in the US, approved by the federal government, could cause a 500% increase in methane emissions in the decade to 2030 if all planned developments go ahead, according to Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics.

“So while it’s all very well and good to clean up the methane fugitives from the oil and gas industry, let’s be clear – the US is ramping up its gas production at a time when it should be working out how to cut it,” Hare said.

The newly strengthened standards will help slash methane emissions by 87% by 2030, compared with 2005 levels, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, through new regulations to curb gas flaring and leaks of methane from oil and gas drills and pumps. A new program will require oil and gas companies to respond to third-party reports of methane leaks.

Environmental groups called upon Biden, still facing the possibility of Republican control of Congress following midterm elections, to more aggressively wield the unilateral power of the presidency to shift away from fossil fuel use.

“The new methane reduction plan is welcome and long overdue, but President Biden must bring far more to these negotiations,” said Jean Su, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s energy justice program. “It’s past time for Biden to declare a climate emergency and stop approving new fossil fuel projects that will release more methane into the atmosphere, even with these standards.”

It’s proved a mixed Cop27 for the US in Sharm el-Sheikh. The American delegation has been keen to tout the reputation-boosting passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping package of clean energy support and the first major climate bill ever enacted by the US. John Kerry, the US climate envoy, has called the law “transformational” and “one of the most important bills in the past 50 years”.

But critics have pointed out that the US has yet to provide anywhere near the level of climate finance that befits its role as the world’s economic superpower and largest emitter of carbon pollution in history. Even the $11bn already promised by the US to support developing countries ravaged by climate-driven storms, fires and drought, which Kerry has admitted is not enough, is uncertain given the possible makeup of Congress.

The issue of “loss and damage” – funds for repair and reconstruction paid by wealthy countries to poorer nations suffering unavoidable depredations due to the climate crisis – made it on to the agenda at Cop27 but US officials have said discussions over any sort of funding mechanism could take another two years.

“We have a responsibility, we made a commitment,” Nancy Pelosi, for now the speaker of the House of Representatives, said of developing countries in a visit to Cop27. But, she added, “it is a challenge, and we haven’t succeeded yet, to get the global funding that we need to be good neighbours on this planet.”

Alice Hill, a former climate adviser to Barack Obama, said: “President Biden wants to keep the 1.5C goal, insisting that every emitting nation do its part. He announced a slew of new climate programs, but he couldn’t deliver what the developing world most wants – enough money to adapt to climate extremes. He will need Congress to cooperate to accomplish that.”

Activists from around the world at Cop27 said the US needed to do far more but planet-heating emissions in the US are expected to rise about 1.5% this year, due to a surge in gas use and a rebound in air travel following the depths of the Covid pandemic.

“The US is the biggest historic polluter and has the financial and technological wherewithal to solve the climate crisis yet has failed time and time again to honour its pledges,” said Mohamed Adow, director of the thinktank Power Shift Africa.

“We are paying for the crimes of corporations and the global north, who have made Pakistan a hub for climate disasters,” said Farooq Tariq, a veteran climate activist from Pakistan. More than a third of his country has been inundated by flooding since June, displacing more than 30 million people, and scientists have said global heating likely worsened the disaster.

“We don’t want any more words, we want debt suspension, we want reparations, we want climate justice,” said Tariq.

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Biden to Announce Restrictions on Methane Emissions at COP27

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SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt—President Biden is moving to tighten restrictions on emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and boost funding for developing countries to adapt to the effects of climate change and transition to cleaner technologies, according to the White House. 

Mr. Biden is expected to announce the measures in a speech before a United Nations climate conference, known as COP27, according to a fact sheet released by the White House ahead of the address. The measures include plans for the Environmental Protection Agency to require oil-and-gas companies to monitor existing production facilities for methane leaks and repair them, according to administration officials.

Methane is 80 times as potent at trapping heat from solar radiation as carbon dioxide over its first 20 years in the atmosphere. It is responsible for about half a degree Celsius of global warming since the preindustrial era, and its levels are rising fast, according to measurements made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

The planned rules affect hundreds of thousands of U.S. wells, storage tanks and natural-gas processing plants, and require companies to replace leaky, older equipment and buy new monitoring tools.

EPA Administrator

Michael Regan

said flaring—a technique used by gas producers to burn off excess methane from oil and natural-gas wells—would be reduced at all well sites under the planned rules. Owners would be required to monitor abandoned wells for methane emissions and plug any leaks, he said.

“We’ve tightened down to limit flaring as much as possible without banning it,” Mr. Regan said.

President Biden met on Friday with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi in Sharm El Sheikh.



Photo:

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents U.S. oil and gas producers, said it was reviewing the proposed rule. 

“Federal regulation of methane crafted to build on industry’s progress can help accelerate emissions reductions while developing reliable American energy,”

Frank Macchiarola,

API’s senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs, said in a statement.

Lee Fuller of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, a Washington, D.C., trade group that represents many smaller producers, said his group would be reviewing the regulations closely. 

“While everyone wants to produce oil and natural gas using sound environmental procedures, there will always be a need to assure that the regulatory structure is cost effective and technologically feasible,” he said in a statement. 

Rachel Cleetus, lead economist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy group, said in a statement that the EPA had “taken an important step forward by issuing a robust standard for methane emissions from oil-and-gas operations.”

Mr. Biden is walking a political tightrope during his brief stopover in Egypt on his way to summits in Cambodia and Indonesia. The war in Ukraine has unleashed turmoil in energy markets, underscoring the world’s continued reliance on fossil fuels.

Control of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives still hinged on races that were too close to call as of early Friday morning, with both parties girding for a final outcome that might not be known for days. If Republicans win control of either chamber it would mean more power to a party that is deeply skeptical of Mr. Biden’s climate agenda and reluctant to spend billions of dollars to help other countries transition to cleaner sources of energy.

The White House said Mr. Biden is expected to announce an additional $100 million for the United Nations Adaptation Fund, which helps countries adapt to floods, droughts and storms that climate scientists say are increasing in frequency and severity as the earth’s atmosphere and oceans warm. The U.S. has yet to pay the $50 million it pledged to the fund at last year’s climate talks in Glasgow.

As world leaders gather for the COP27 climate conference in Egypt, WSJ looks at how the war in Ukraine and turmoil in energy markets are complicating efforts to reduce carbon emissions. Photo: Mohammed Salem/Reuters

The U.S. also owes $2 billion to the U.N. Green Climate Fund, which finances renewable energy and climate adaptation projects in the developing world. The administration has asked for $1.6 billion for the fund in the fiscal 2023 budget.

The White House said Mr. Biden would also pledge $150 million to a U.S. fund for climate adaptation and resilience across Africa; $13.6 million to the World Meteorological Organization to collect additional weather, water and climate observation across Africa; and $15 million to support the deployment of early-warning systems in Africa by NOAA in conjunction with local weather-forecasting agencies.

The U.S. pledges don’t address demands from poorer nations to provide money for damage they say is the result of climate-related weather events—a new category of funding known as “loss and damage.” This week at the summit, Belgium and Germany pledged a combined 172 million euros, equivalent to $176 million, to support loss-and-damage payments to developing countries. Scotland pledged $5.8 million and Ireland pledged $10 million.

Developing countries have made a renewed push to set up a mechanism for loss-and-damage payments after severe floods in Pakistan this summer that caused $30 billion in losses, according to World Bank estimates, killed more than 1,700 people and displaced 33 million residents. Sen.

Sherry Rehman,

Pakistan’s federal minister for climate change, said she is hoping for more resources from the U.S. and other nations to help her country.

U.S. negotiators are concerned the concept of loss and damage exposes wealthier nations to spiraling liability. There is also the scientific uncertainty of determining which effects can be tied to human-induced climate change and which are part of normal seasonal variation. However, U.S. climate envoy

John Kerry

said this week at the conference that he is open to discussing loss and damage.

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“We need more,” Ms. Rehman said in an interview. “What you hear everywhere at COP is ‘action now.’ Everything else is fluff.”

Mr. Biden arrived at the climate summit Friday after most world leaders have departed. He met privately with Egyptian President

Abdel Fattah Al Sisi

at the conference, located at a resort town along the Red Sea. The U.S. and Germany were expected to announce Friday a $250 million financing program to build 10 gigawatts of new wind-and-solar energy facilities in Egypt while decommissioning 5 gigawatts of inefficient natural-gas power plants.

The Biden administration’s efforts to curb methane emissions follow an agreement reached on the sidelines of the Glasgow summit a year ago, in which China and the U.S. pledged to work on reducing emissions of the gas. Beijing this week announced a plan to cut methane emissions but hasn’t yet included the new measures in its climate plans submitted to the U.N. 

Nigeria announced its first-ever regulations, including limits on flaring, to cut overall methane emissions by more than 60% over 2020 levels. Canada said Thursday it plans to cut emissions of methane from its oil-and-gas industry by more than 75% over 2012 levels by 2030. 

Emissions from flaring are far higher than previous government and industry estimates, according to an analysis of 300 wells in four states published in September in the journal Science.

The White House says 260 billion cubic meters of gas are wasted every year from flaring and methane emissions within the oil-and-gas sector. 

Under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, countries aim to limit global warming to well under 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and preferably to 1.5 degrees. The gap between the emissions cuts pledged by 166 nations, including the U.S., and their current emissions puts the world on track to warm 2.5 degrees Celsius, or 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit, by the end of the century, according to a recent U.N. report.

White House officials point to Mr. Biden’s support of the Democrats’ climate, health and tax legislation that allocates hundreds of billions of dollars to climate and energy programs, including tax credits for buying electric vehicles and investments in clean technologies.

Administration officials said the legislation has helped put the U.S. on track to meeting Mr. Biden’s goal of cutting domestic emissions 50% below 2005 levels by 2030.

—Matthew Dalton and Scott Patterson contributed to this article.

Write to Eric Niiler at eric.niiler@wsj.com

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‘Everyone will be watching’: US midterms cast a long shadow over Cop27 | Cop27

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For Joe Biden, the United Nations climate summit in Egypt is the crowning stage to trumpet the US finally passing major legislation to slow dangerous global heating. But the thoughts of the US president and delegates from around the world are likely to nervously flit to events 6,000 miles (9,65km) away – knife-edge midterm elections back in America.

The climate talks, known as Cop27, begin in earnest on Monday when more than 90 heads of state convene in Sharm el-Sheikh amid warnings from scientists that the world is heading towards disastrous climate breakdown without further, deeper cuts in planet-heating emissions. António Guterres, secretary general of the UN, has warned governments heading to Egypt that they face “economy-destroying levels of global heating” and that their efforts to stem this disaster were falling “pitifully short”.

Biden’s administration is aiming to enter Cop27 in a mood of determined optimism, officials have said in briefings, having successfully secured passage of the landmark Inflation Reduction Act thanks to Democratic votes in Congress over the summer, a $370bn (£331bn) package to boost clean energy that is the first significant climate bill ever enacted by the US.

But the White House’s attempts to portray the US as an empowered standard-bearer of climate action risk being undermined just a day into the conference, with midterm elections on Tuesday potentially shifting control of Congress to Republicans, sharply critical of what they call the president’s “radical green agenda”.

Biden will arrive in Sharm el-Sheikh on 11 November, shortly after the midterm election, but probably before the full results of the vote. The prospect of the president’s program being partially unpicked by Republican gains would dampen hopes of further progress from the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases.

“Everyone at Cop27 will be watching the US election and will be trying to understand what it means, it will affect the overall tenor of the talks,” said Nathan Hultman, a climate policy expert who was part of the US’s negotiating team at last year’s Cop26 talks in Scotland.

“We have this strong, transformational body of work from Congress which has completely changed the narrative on the US. We are in a good position to reach our emissions reduction target, but obviously it is harder if elections don’t go to plan.”

The US has been a hugely influential yet unreliable actor during the climate crisis, with its unusually partisan politics leaving leaders of other countries to nervously watch American elections for sharp swings in climate policy. “The US will arrive with a good message to tell that it is a leader on climate, but the political winds can quickly change,” said Alice Hill, a former advisor to Barack Obama, now climate expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“If the results go against the Democrats we are unlikely to see more climate legislation and there will be more legal challenges to actions taken by the Biden administration. There will be question marks over how much the US can follow through on climate.”

John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, has remained bullish over the prospects of using American influence in Egypt. Scientists have warned that the world remains badly off track to avoid disastrous climate change, with emissions reduction pledges to date delivering a likely 2.5C (4.5F) in global heating, over pre-industrial times, which is well beyond the internationally-agreed ‘safe’ limit of 1.5C (2.7F).

“No country has a right to be delinquent in not putting up an NDC [a nationally determined contribution to cut emissions], not strengthening it where they can, and not being part of this effort,” Kerry said in a recent briefing with journalists, adding that “everybody needs to do their part here” and he wants “to make sure that everybody understands we’re doing the things necessary to keep 1.5C alive”.

A sign promoting Cop27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Photograph: Thomas Hartwell/AP

Kerry is likely to come under pressure at Cop27 from developing countries unhappy that a promised $100bn (£89.4bn) a year from rich countries in climate finance has yet to be delivered, as well as on the issue of loss and damage, which would provide poorer nations a form of compensation from floods, heatwaves, droughts and other impacts they did little to cause themselves.

A group of 143 climate groups have written to Kerry to criticize the US’s “recalcitrant” stance on loss and damage, demanding progress on the issue in Egypt. “The United States has stood in the way over the loss and damage facility, and countries that are suffering right now are still demanding that facility,” Vanessa Nakate, a Ugandan climate justice activist, said recently. “I need to see the United States helping those that are suffering right now.”

Delegates from less wealthy countries say they are almost at their wits’ end over the lack of progress on damages paid by the US and others. “We recognize the key role of the US in these climate talks and we congratulate their steps to taking leadership in the fight against climate change domestically,” said Madeleine Diouf Sarr, a Senegalese official who is chair of the Least Developed Countries, a negotiating bloc of 46 nations.

But Sarr added that “we are reaching the point where our patience with hearing the same old arguments is over. Now, look around the world to see all the devastation that could not be adapted to, It is simply obvious that climate change outpaces our abilities to perfectly prepare for it. We cannot rebuild houses with words.”

US negotiators have said they are open to discussing the idea at Cop27, but are wary of opening up any sort of liability that could be imposed upon America. Kerry said he wanted “serious dialogue” over loss and damage but has not committed to any form of deal. Regardless, Republicans would probably try to scupper any attempt at providing any sort of new climate aid to developing countries, should the GOP prevail in the midterms.

“Biden still has two years left in his term and there are now strong regulations in place that will be sticky and help nudge the existing momentum on renewable energy and electric cars,” said Hultman. “Depending on that momentum, the outcome of the election may not be hugely consequential. But we will have to see how things lie after 8 November.”

Democrats, meanwhile, are not only fretting over their electoral prospects going into Cop27 but are questioning the setting of the talks themselves, given Egypt’s dismal human rights record. “Egypt was the wrong choice for Cop27,” said Don Beyer, a Democratic congressman who has called on Kerry to raise human rights issues with the Egyptian government. “Its government jails environmental and political activists and treats NGOs as a threat.”

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