Cox: #Saudi may have a super-green future after all | Reuters

Cox: Saudi may have a super-green future after all | Reuters

Something funky happened in Naples the other day, which is saying a lot for the magically chaotic city loomed over by tempestuous Mount Vesuvius. No, it had nothing to do with the city’s famous pizza or its notorious Camorra gangsters. Instead, it was a low-key but potentially significant step in the fight against global warming: Saudi Arabia sided with the club of climate crusaders.

Two weeks ago, in the Royal Palace once occupied by the Bourbon kings, energy and environment ministers from the Group of 20 rich nations got together to discuss key climate change commitments. While progress was made, the final communique lacked consensus on two critical points: fixing a deadline for phasing out coal power and pledges to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

For many participants, including the United States, the UK and Italy – which holds the rotating presidency of the wealthy-country club – that risked overshadowing 58 other points of agreement. But look closer, and there are reasons to be hopeful the decarb laggards will eventually come around. For one, China and India were the main holdouts to those provisions, not Saudi, the reigning king of hydrocarbons, with 267 billion barrels of oil reserves.

Moreover, during the negotiations in Naples presided over by Roberto Cingolani, Italy’s minister for ecological transition, alongside U.S. special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry, the Saudis played an uncharacteristic role in trying to bring dawdling polluters on board. In the last hours of horse-trading, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, a professed Italophile who is Saudi’s energy minister, proposed a bilateral conversation to break the impasse with his counterparts in New Delhi, whose delegates, like Beijing’s, were linked up remotely by video.