Argentina stokes concerns it could quit Paris climate accord

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Argentina said on Thursday it would “re-evaluate” its role in global climate talks after walking out of the COP29 summit, fuelling concerns that the South American country could become the first to follow Donald Trump’s threatened exit from the landmark Paris agreement.

Trump’s campaign said he would withdraw the US from the Paris climate accord on his return to the White House, as he did during his first term, leaving ministers and negotiators at COP29 in Azerbaijan to fret that other populist leaders could follow suit.

Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei withdrew the delegation of negotiators his country had sent to the UN climate summit in Baku on Wednesday, a day after speaking to Trump by phone.

Milei demoted Argentina’s environment portfolio to a junior departmental level after taking office last year as part of a sweeping austerity package and sharp ideological realignment of his country’s environmental and foreign policy. He has said human-caused climate change is “a socialist lie”.

Milei’s spokesperson told a press briefing on Thursday: “The [withdrawal of the COP29 delegation] will allow the new foreign minister to re-evaluate the situation, reflect on our position. It’s part of the measures that the foreign minister is starting to take in his new role.”

Ana Lamas, Argentina’s under-secretary for the environment, declined to comment further on whether the country was considering an exit from the Paris agreement. “The delegation is coming back to Argentina, for now there is no more information,” she told the Financial Times.

Milei fired foreign minister Diana Mondino last month after Argentina sided with Cuba at a UN vote condemning the US’s economic sanctions on the Caribbean nation.

He and his new foreign minister Gerardo Werthein, a wealthy businessman who was until recently Buenos Aires’ ambassador to the US, are this weekend due to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, where they aim to meet Trump.

The US is the only country to have left the Paris agreement. Almost 200 countries signed the blueprint to limit the global average temperature rise. Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro threatened to withdraw, but did not follow through.

Many of the countries at the UN meeting have rushed to present a united front, arguing that even if the US quit the Paris agreement, the global context was very different from the first Trump term. Countries and industries had begun to make the shift to green energy as they took into account the further consequences of climate change, they maintained.

“The health of the Paris Agreement is quite good,” said Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s climate envoy, in Baku. “You have here a multilateral forum where countries work together to find solutions, despite geopolitical tensions, despite elections.

“We have been through elections in the past and have continued to move forward,” she said. The “costs and devastation” of climate change were prompting countries to act.

Another lead negotiator said: “The world has moved on. The economic case is strong for the transition — there are so many renewables all over the world.”

Argentina had been in charge of the so-called Sur negotiating bloc of countries at the two-week climate summit, and has been replaced by Brazil.

The Argentine delegation had submitted a statement to the COP29 opening meeting on Tuesday, declaring the nation’s opposition to “the imposition of regulations and bans promoted by the very countries that developed by doing the same things they are questioning today”.

A central objective of the Baku summit is to set a new finance goal to help poorer countries shift to green energy and adapt to climate change, but the talks have been overshadowed by controversies during its opening days as well as the absence of more than half of the world’s leaders.

France also decided not to send a senior political official to the summit this week, after the host country’s President Ilham Aliyev used a speech at the event to accuse the “regime of President [Emmanuel] Macron” of “brutally” killing citizens during recent protests in New Caledonia.