Between climate crisis and nuclear threat, a dark G20 summit

Between climate crisis and nuclear threat, the G20 summit ended Tuesday in Rio de Janeiro in a particularly gloomy climate, a few weeks before Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

A “fight for survival”. This is how Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva raised one of the major challenges of this two-day summit: saving the climate.

Alas, the conclave of leaders of the main economies of the planet failed to give any decisive impetus in this area, while the UN climate conference, COP29, entered its home stretch in Baku , in Azerbaijan.

However, expectations were high in Rio, with the G20 (19 countries, as well as the European Union and the African Union) accounting for 85% of global GDP and 80% of greenhouse gas emissions.

At the end of a year of Brazilian presidency of the forum, and before hosting COP30 next year in Belem, in the heart of the Amazon, Lula urged action.

“We cannot postpone the task of Baku to Belem,” he warned during the final plenary session of the summit on Tuesday morning.

“History is watching us”, also launched American President Joe Biden, referring to “the greatest existential threat to humanity”, a few weeks before leaving power.

– Fossil energies –

But these calls cannot hide the limits of the joint declaration adopted Monday evening by the G20 leaders.

The text evokes “the need to increase climate finance” and bring it to “trillions of dollars, from all sources”, emphasizing the needs of poor countries.

But for some NGOs, the forum did not go far enough on the question of who should pay. And he even backed down on the subject of phasing out fossil fuels, by not explicitly using the wording that had been taken from the previous climate conference in Dubai.

“In the fight for survival, there is no place for negationism and disinformation,” Lula also insisted.

The message takes on particular resonance before the return of Donald Trump, who has questioned the reality of climate change and said he wants to take the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement again, as during his first term.

The United States is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world after China.

– Nuclear weapon –

Despite the Brazilian president’s wish to talk about the “poor” rather than wars, the latter also emerged at the Rio summit, starting with Ukraine.
It must be said that the meeting, of which Russian President Vladimir Putin was once again notably absent, was held at a dramatic moment.

On Sunday, on the eve of the summit, Washington authorized kyiv to use its long-range missiles to strike targets in Russia.

On the 1,000th day of the war, Moscow claimed on Tuesday that such an attack had taken place on the night of Monday to Tuesday, and President Vladimir Putin signed the decree expanding its possibilities of using nuclear weapons.

From Rio, the head of Russian diplomacy Sergei Lavrov promised an “appropriate” response to the Ukrainian firing of American ATACMS missiles against Russia. Denouncing Washington’s involvement, he spoke of a “new phase” in the conflict.

Americans and British condemned “irresponsible rhetoric” from Moscow.

French President Emmanuel Macron called Vladimir Putin “to reason”, criticizing his “escalatory” posture. During a meeting with his Chinese counterpart, he urged Xi Jinping, who has established himself as the strong man at the summit, to “use all his weight” with the Russian leader.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who did not participate in the G20 leaders’ summit, denounced their inaction in the face of Russian nuclear discourse.

At the end of this twilight summit, Lula handed over to his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa, whose country will chair the forum from December for a year.

With sobs in his voice, he quoted Nelson Mandela, hero of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa: “It is easy to demolish and destroy, the heroes are those who build”.

LNT with Afp

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