U.S. Helped to Weaken Report at U.N. Environment Talks, Participants Say

Reporting from Washington The Trump administration sided with officials from Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran in a successful effort to block part of a United Nations report about the dire state of the planet because it called for phasing out fossil fuels, switching to clean energy and reducing plastics, according to two participants. The section targeted was a summary of the , a 1,210-page report that translates scientific evidence collected and reviewed by 300 experts into plain language that can be used by governments around the world. It was issued on Monday at the U.N. Environment Assembly in Nairobi. It was the first time that countries failed to issue a summary for policymakers since the United Nations Environment Program began publishing outlook reports in 1997. During negotiations over the document in October, the U.S. sided with Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran to block the summary from being included, according to David Broadstock, a partner in the Lantau Group, an energy and environmental consulting firm with offices around the Asia-Pacific region, and Patrick Schroder, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, a research organization based in London. The move was another indication of how sharply the Trump administration has reversed course on the environment. Under the Biden administration, the United States had made tackling climate change a top priority and frequently clashed with oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia over their approaches to global warming. Some authors of the study blame U.S. officials for undermining the process by coming in at the last minute to voice opposition. The Trump administration did not send a delegation to the October meeting in Nairobi where the report was assembled, but it did shape the final outcome, according to Dr. Broadstock, who was a coordinating author for two of the reports 21 chapters and a negotiator in discussions of the summary for policymakers. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and your Times account, or for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? . Want all of The Times? .