Argentina’s Milei Government Pulls Negotiators From COP29 Talks

Argentine President Javier Milei looks on as he is received by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the Chancellery in Berlin on June 23, 2024. Liesa Johannssen/Reuters

The libertarian government of Argentine President Javier Milei has withdrawn its negotiators from the COP29 talks.

On Nov. 14, Ana Lamas, deputy secretary of the environment for the national government, confirmed that Argentinian negotiators had been called back to Buenos Aires.

The Epoch Times contacted the Milei government for further comment but didn’t receive a reply by publication time.

In a post on social media platform X, the climate change news site Carbon Brief said that Argentina had 85 people registered in its delegation at the 2024 U.N. climate change conference (also called COP29).

High on the agenda at the climate talks is a deal to provide up to $1 trillion in annual climate financing for developing countries, replacing the previous target of $100 billion.

Milei

Milei, a self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist, was inaugurated as Argentina’s president last year after defeating Sergio Massa, economy minister for Alberto Fernández’s socialist administration, with a promise to tackle the country’s inflationary economy by dollarizing the peso and minimizing government spending.

Milei eliminated the Environment Ministry as part of a promised effort to shrink the government. In December 2023, he said that the country would remain part of the Paris Agreement on climate change, a legally binding international treaty on climate change to limit the rise in global temperatures.

He is expected to meet with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and Tesla/X owner Elon Musk this week and has sought close ties with the United States since the election.

At odds with COP29, under the incoming Trump administration, the United States is expected to prioritize domestic energy production—including oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear power—while streamlining permitting processes and removing market restrictions on fossil fuels.

Trump has promised to reduce electricity and natural gas prices through increased domestic production and the dismantling of the Green New Deal, which he has characterized as “socialist.”

SDGs

The libertarian administration of Argentina has rejected “Agenda 2030.”

In his U.N. speech in September, Milei took aim at the 2030 Agenda’s sustainable development goals (SDG), a global initiative for sustainable economic growth and environmental protection.

Some of the U.N. literature supporting SDGs calls for equitable reductions in the scale of production. The language used reflects “degrowth,” a formerly radical theory that focuses on shrinking economies in order to use less of the world’s resources, he said.

Milei said that although this is “well-intentioned in its goals,” it is “nothing more than a supranational government program with a socialist slant.”

“If the 2030 agenda failed, as its own promoters acknowledge, the answer should be to ask ourselves if it was not an ill-conceived program to begin with,” he said.

Milei said that his own country “is undergoing a profound process of change at the present.”

“[Argentina] has decided to embrace the ideas of freedom,” he said.

France

Many leaders have skipped this year’s summit.

U.S. President Joe Biden is not attending and will instead be represented by White House climate adviser and veteran Democratic Party strategist John Podesta.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has sent a deputy, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is not going because of political developments in Brussels.

French climate minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher on Nov. 13 canceled her trip to COP29 after Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev accused France and Holland of “colonial rule” in a COP speech.

France and Azerbaijan have long had tense relations because of Paris’s supplying arms to Armenia as tensions remain high over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Azerbaijan is systematically “erasing” all traces of the largely Christian ethnic Armenian community “at warp speed” in the region.

“These unacceptable statements risk to undermine the conference’s vital climate objectives and the credibility of Azerbaijan’s COP29 presidency,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell wrote in a post on X.

Researcher Ben Pile, who runs the Climate Debate UK campaign group, previously told The Epoch Times, “Fortunately, much of the world seems to be staying away from COP29.”

Reuters contributed to this report.