It was the showdown nobody wanted. But in the end, it saved the climate summit.
As the clock ticked past the deadline of 6pm on Friday in Belem, Brazil, the issue that, rightly or wrongly, came to define this year’s UN climate talks was still unresolved.
The great, unanswered question was how to talk about fossil fuels: two words pathetically controversial for a summit trying to tackle climate change, given they are the main cause.
But it had taken 28 COP meetings to even name those words in a deal. Finally, the promise came in Dubai in 2023 to “transition away from fossil fuels”.
The decision, known as the “UAE consensus”, was hailed as “historic” at the time.
But few countries have done much about it since.
Two years later in Brazil, a push for a plan at COP30 on how to actually transition from fossil fuels gathered steam, garnering support from at least 80 countries.
They had already set the target in Dubai, this was about how to get there.
The proposal was made more credible by the fact that it wasn’t just wealthy Europeans such as the UK and Germany, with little fossil fuels themselves anyway, who were supporting it.
It was also backed by countries including the oil-rich Sierra Leone, where two in three people still need electricity, and coal-major Colombia.
But it was too much to stomach for economies that rely on fossil fuels, like Russia and the Arab negotiating group.
A bombshell draft of the final deal that landed on the table on Friday had deleted all three earlier proposals for a fossil fuel plan.
The European Union commissioner Wopke Hoekstra was livid. “This current thing is clearly a non-starter, and we will need to significantly beef this up,” he said as he charged through the main tent of the conference, flanked by aides and journalists scavenging for soundbites.
“If that doesn’t happen, we’re clearly facing a no-deal scenario.”
Colombia was spitting feathers. “We cannot accept a text that is not dealing with the real problems. We won’t be silent,” thundered its environment minister Irene Velez Torres.
A sweltering meeting of ministers, drowned out by the sound of generators and Amazon rain pounding on the tent above, had yielded nothing.
The mighty all-nighter
Then came the more than 12-hour, overnight session that nearly collapsed the whole process – before finally breaking the deadlock.
Early evening on Friday, upstairs in the UN-patrolled conference, the Brazilian president of the talks, Andre Aranha Correa do Lago, met with around 80 people from different negotiating groups.
The protagonists on the one side included China, Saudi Arabia and India, who in fact are already transitioning their energy systems away from fossil fuels, but resent being told to speed up by countries that have already got rich from their own fossil fuel-powered industrial revolutions.
On the other side of the still yawning chasm were the UK, EU, Latin American countries and small island states, who thought the credibility of the COP process was on the line if they didn’t inch forward on tackling fossil fuels.
It was a squabble over semantics, but at its heart the tension was over the pressing need to act faster on climate change, and who is to blame for that urgency.
This is when it does pay to have made rapid progress on climate action back home, as Britain broadly has, because it strengthens your hand when asking other countries to do more.
But the two groups remained diametrically opposed. COPs are always tense at the end, but the stakes felt higher than in previous years because countries were considering walking away.
“It felt on a knife edge,” said someone close to the negotiations, speaking on condition of anonymity, as all diplomats at COP do to protect relationships.
UK energy secretary Ed Miliband said on Saturday: “I spent much of the night thinking, genuinely, we were not going to get an agreement, and for us, we were willing to walk away.”
Cruise ships, coffee and crackers
The all-night session was kept afloat by coffee that arrived about every two hours, saltine crackers and traditional Brazilian cheese dough-balls.
“Various folks arrived through the night. [Brazil’s climate minister] Marina Silva was there at one point. Senior Chinese and Saudi figures turned up at possibly 4 or 5am, but I’ve lost track of time,” said one person familiar with what happened.
Some aides peeled off to go and check out from the cruise ship where they’d been staying – brought in by Brazil due to a lack of hotel rooms in rough-and-ready Belem – before it was rumoured to set sail at 8am on Saturday.
Others couldn’t keep their eyes open.
“There were people negotiating on one end of sofa, and snoring on the other end,” another person present told Sky News.
“Someone else was sitting on the floor, holding onto a fire extinguisher, asleep. It was hot.”
By hosting the COP on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, Brazil gave visitors a taste of life in a hotter world: almost daily 30°C heat, 80% humidity, and torrential downpours that flood roads and wash out livelihoods.
A new dawn
Inside the venue, finally, as the sun dawned on Saturday morning, a path emerged.
The bleary-eyed ministers and negotiators still standing at about 6am figured out they could hint at a fossil fuel plan, but without saying the words out loud.
The final agreement is a fudge: it promises to “accelerate implementation”, taking into account previous decisions “such as the United Arab Emirates Consensus” – in a nod to the previous fossil fuel pledge.
Ed Miliband said: “We thought there had to be an acknowledgement of the UAE consensus… We thought we weren’t going to get it. We thought we were quite potentially looking at no deal.
“And then, just before seven o’clock in the morning, that opened up, and that’s what opened the space for there to be an agreement.”
Climate-progressive countries didn’t really want to leave with nothing – afraid a breakdown would play into the hand of Donald Trump, who is pulling the US out of the process. So they accepted the compromise and a voluntary process on fossil fuels to be launched outside of the COP process.
Applause masked disappointment
There were then a few hours to dash back to hotels, perhaps grab 90 minutes of sleep and a shower, before coming back for the closing session to see the deal signed off. Nothing is official until the final gavel falls.
“What struck me in those moments was nobody in that room really wanted to be the people who brought the thing down,” said a bleary-eyed Mr Miliband on Saturday, looking like he could topple over at any moment.
“But actually there was a will to keep the show on the road.”
Another source told Sky News that China was anxious to get an agreement.
Once back in the plenary hall, the agreement was so fragile, many feared it could all still fall apart.
When the COP president Mr do Lago proclaimed the deal done and struck his ceremonial gavel, the room erupted in a standing ovation.
The truth is that the applause masked a lot of disappointment.
COP is the annual test of the world’s appetite for tackling climate change and working together – and both are falling out of fashion.
What they were really cheering was that they had any deal at all.
A few rays of hope came from other promises to finally triple cash for developing countries to cope with ever more extreme weather, more money for forests, and recognition that the switch to clean energy needs to be fair for workers and communities.
The final package was no crowning glory of the COP process.
It was a glue that kept the process stuck together, in a fractured world, for now.
