The following are excerpts from a story published on November 18, 2024 in the New York Times.

As United Nations climate talks enter their final week in Azerbaijan and G20 leaders gather in Brazil, diplomats from Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, are working to foil any agreement that renews a pledge to transition away from fossil fuels, negotiators said.

“Maybe they’ve been emboldened by Trump’s victory, but they are acting with abandon here,” said Alden Meyer, senior associate with E3G, a London-based climate research organization, who is at the talks in Azerbaijan. “They’re just being a wrecking ball.”

Negotiators say it’s part of a yearlong campaign by Saudi Arabia to stymie an agreement made last year by 200 nations to move away from oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is dangerously heating the planet.

Saudi Arabia was one of the signatories to that deal, but has been working ever since to bury that pledge and make sure it’s not repeated in any new global agreements, according to five diplomats who requested anonymity to discuss the closed-door negotiations.

With varying degrees of success, the Saudis have opposed transition language in at least five U.N. resolutions this year, the diplomats said. The Saudis fought it at a United Nations nuclear conference, at a summit of small island nations, during discussions of a U.N. blueprint for tackling global challenges, at a biodiversity summit and at a meeting of the Group of 20 finance ministers in Washington in October, according to the diplomats.

Saudi government officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The election of Donald J. Trump has cast a pall over the climate negotiations in Azerbaijan, known as COP29. Mr. Trump has promised to withdraw the United States from the global fight against climate change and increase the American production of fossil fuels, which is already at record levels. That may be emboldening Saudi officials at the current climate talks, analysts say. On Saturday, Yasir O. Al-Rumayyan, the chairman of the board at Saudi Aramco, the state petroleum company, sat ringside with Mr. Trump at a U.F.C. fight in Madison Square Garden in New York City.

U.N. rules require that any agreement forged at climate summits be endorsed by all 198 participating nations. That means Saudi Arabia, or any other nation, can sink a deal.

Diplomats inside the rooms in at the climate conference in Baku said the current Saudi opposition was unlike anything they had seen. Credit...Aziz Karimov/Reuters

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(In COP 28) Eventually, under enormous pressure from small island nations and the host government, the United Arab Emirates, the Saudis acquiesced to language calling on nations to contribute to “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.”

Almost immediately, Saudi Arabia appeared to work against the promise.

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During the same month, Amin Nasser, the head of Saudi Aramco, which is the world’s biggest oil producer, told a gathering of the oil industry in Houston, “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.”

Lisa Friedman wrote this article and David Gelles contributed reporting from Baku, Azerbaijan, and Catrin Einhorn from New York.