By AFP - Agence France Presse
Is Argentina's Milei about to leave the Paris Climate Agreement?
By Sonia AVALOS
Argentina's abrupt withdrawal from the COP29 climate talks in Azerbaijan has raised alarm bells that President Javier Milei - an ally of US President-elect Donald Trump - could be considering pulling out of the Paris Agreement.
Such a move would align Milei's climate change skepticism with Trump's position - and deal a blow to the 2015 international agreement aimed at curbing global warming.
“If Milei's government decides to pull out of the Paris Agreement, we will be facing enormous legal and constitutional implications,” said Maximiliano Ferraro, an Argentine lawmaker from the opposition Civic Coalition.
Milei - a populist who has taken radical measures to reduce inflation in his country - has already downgraded his environment ministry to a sub-secretariat and eliminated a fund for the protection of native forests.
The Argentine delegation expected at COP29, the UN climate talks taking place in Azerbaijan this week, suddenly withdrew, confirmed a source in the Environment Ministry, without giving details of the decision.
Foreign Minister Gerardo Werthein told The Washington Post that “we are re-evaluating our strategy on all issues related to climate change” but added that Buenos Aires had not decided at the time to leave the Paris Agreement.
On Thursday, Milei attended a gala ball at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida alongside the world's richest man, Elon Musk. At the event, Milei celebrated Trump's “greatest political comeback in history.”
Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement in 2017, during his first time as president.
The current US president, Joe Biden, brought his country back into the agreement in 2021, but Trump has promised to reverse that order when he takes over the White House in January.
On Monday and Tuesday, Biden and Milei will attend a G20 summit in Brazil that will discuss international efforts to limit climate change, but the US leader is seen as a lame-duck leader at the meeting.
Greenpeace Argentina said the country's withdrawal from negotiations with Azerbaijan was a “bad sign.”
Ferraro, the opposition lawmaker, said that if there is a withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, “we will be entering a nebulous path of isolation.”
Milei has a history of putting environmental considerations well below economic ones.
In June, he declared: “Nature must serve human beings and their well-being, not the other way around.”
He added that “the main environmental problem we have is extreme poverty, and that will only be solved if we use our resources.”
Oscar Soria, director of The Common Initiative, a New York-based group campaigning for financial reform to promote biodiversity, told AFP that “there is growing concerned about the possibility of Argentina pulling out of the Paris Agreement”.
But he stressed that such a move “cannot be done by a simple decree” - it would need the approval of the Argentine Congress.
Argentina ratified the Paris Agreement in 2016, which means that any change would enter constitutional territory.
This would also be contrary to the “solid legislation on climate action” in the country, said Soria.
“If it goes there, we are ready for a legal battle.”
Soria added that “with or without Argentina, global climate action will continue. This was demonstrated in the United States when Donald Trump decided to withdraw from the Paris Agreement in 2017. Many far-right leaders have underestimated the Paris Agreement.”
Guillermo Folguera, a biologist at Argentina's National Council for Scientific and Technical Research, said there was hope that NGOs could curb government policies that consider the environment “only as a way to generate assets and not as a space for life.”
Ferraro suggested that Milei's actions could be a way of getting closer to Trump.
“I wonder if it's just a show put on by President Milei to offer this as a sacrificial ritual in his meeting with US President-elect Donald Trump?”
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