Argentina withdrew its negotiators from the COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Wednesday, the third day of the conference.
“It’s true. We have instructions from the ministry of foreign affairs to no longer participate. That’s all I can tell you,” said Argentina’s Undersecretary for the Environment Ana Maria Vidal de Lamas, the most senior representative of her country at the conference.
The Buenos Aires Herald reported that “at least three government representatives from the Foreign Ministry and the Tourism Ministry were given a ‘non-negotiable’ order to suspend all activities and return to Argentina.”
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“The officials in question had not been allowed to participate in the debates of the summit during the two days prior. Delegates sent by Argentine provinces were permitted to stay behind in Baku,” the Buenos Aires Herald added.
Lamas said her government has not made any decision about withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is widely expected to. Trump withdrew the United States from the 2015 agreement during his first term, while his successor, President Joe Biden, recommitted to the agreement in February 2021.
Milei is an admirer of Trump, a skeptic of climate alarmism, and a libertarian devoted to rolling back onerous regulations and government spending to stimulate Argentina’s economy.
“Interestingly, Argentina’s withdrawal from the summit came a day after Milei spoke with Trump. The spokesperson of the Argentine president said Trump had told Milei he was his ‘favorite president,’” Firstpost noted.
Milei has plans to visit the United States to meet with Trump this week. He was among the first world leaders to congratulate Trump on his “formidable electoral victory” on November 5. Later, he extended “blessings” to Trump, urged him to “Make America Great Again,” and posted an AI-generated photo of Trump hugging a lion that represented Milei:
“In the history of the Earth, there is a cycle of temperatures,” Milei said during the October presidential debate in Argentina. “We are not going to adhere to the 2030 Agenda. We do not adhere to cultural Marxism. We do not adhere to decadence.”
The 2030 Agenda is a list of stringent social, economic, and climate goals promoted by the United Nations in 2015. No major industrialized nation has come anywhere close to meeting its goals. The U.N.’s latest report on the agenda said that progress toward half of its 140 targets was “weak and insufficient,” with about a third of those targets stalling out completely or reversing.
Milei dissolved several expensive government ministries soon after taking office, including the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity; the Ministry of Culture; the Ministry of Social Development; and the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, whose functions were absorbed into the Ministry of the Interior. This reduced the chief environmental officer to an undersecretary role, which Lamas currently occupies.
Milei has since wavered on whether or not he would withdraw completely from the Paris agreement. In December, his freshly appointed “climate diplomat,” Marcia Levaggi, said Argentina would “stay committed to the Paris Agreement” and “honor all our environmental agreements,” including its goal of reaching “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050.
“Milei is a liberal, he’s a libertarian, and he believes in market forces. And the market demands to include measures to address climate change,” Levaggi said of her new boss. Levaggi is currently the undersecretary of Foreign Policy at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Climate activists were angered and dismayed by Argentina’s withdrawal from COP29. Climate management specialist Carla Chavarria warned that Argentina risked “losing its voice in climate finance negotiations,” which are the focus of the meeting.
“At a key moment to secure resources against the climate crisis, the country is left out, weakening its future and its ability to adapt,” she complained.
An Argentine group called the Citizen’s Association for Human Rights said it was “sad” to see the delegation from Buenos Aires depart, having “participated in the negotiation group on the gender program in the climate change convention” with Argentinian representatives. The notion that Milei might have taken COP29 less seriously because it had a “gender program” for climate change does not appear to have occurred to them.
It also seems to have eluded climate activists that the hyper-politicized nature of the climate confab might have raised Milei’s hackles.
The host of COP29, Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, kicked off the event by telling climate activists to stop complaining about his country’s valuable oil and gas industry and then spent part of his keynote speech railing against French “neo-colonialism.”
French Ecology Minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher responded by pulling out of the conference and denouncing Aliyev’s speech as “deplorable” and a “flagrant violation of the code of conduct” for U.N. climate talks. The rest of the French team remained in Baku, however.
On Wednesday, Iranian Vice President Shina Ansari hijacked the climate conference to demand sanctions relief for her terrorism-supporting government. Ansari also blamed the Western world for climate change, giving no indication that her own petro-state would compromise its goals of increased oil production to satisfy climate activists.
