By Catherine Osborn, the writer of Foreign Policy’s weekly Latin America Brief.
Argentine President Alberto Fernández is preparing to play what may appear an unlikely role next week: host of a virtual regional dialogue on climate change.
Argentina’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions of 8.89 metric tons as of 2018 are among the highest in Latin America and some 38 percent above the global average. Fernández, for his part, has focused little on renewable energy since he entered office in 2019—instead embracing public subsidies for conventional energy consumption and oil exploration, especially the development of the massive Vaca Muerta shale deposit in the country’s west.
Yet with encouragement from Washington, Buenos Aires will convene digital forums next Wednesday designed to raise Latin American climate ambitions ahead of November’s United Nations summit in Scotland. The event—which Argentina reportedly conceived, and which Barbados, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama, and the Dominican Republic signed on to co-host—can be partly attributed to U.S. climate diplomacy in the region. It is especially notable given that this same climate diplomacy has fallen flat with some of Argentina’s neighbors, including Brazil.
Overall, Fernández’s overture shows Argentina’s interest in good relations with Washington. The event may make for positive optics ahead of Argentina’s November midterm elections. And it also comes as Fernández is seeking favorable terms on the restructuring of $45 billion in debt to the International Monetary Fund, where the United States is the primary shareholder.
Kerry’s courtship. Countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are responsible for 8 percent of global emissions. With a few important exceptions, their various decarbonization policies of recent years “have not been able to significantly reduce emissions or change the path of development toward a low emission future,” Del Rosario University political scientist Matías Franchini wrote in a January article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics.
As a result, European countries and organizations have been particularly active in backing Latin America’s efforts at decarbonization—and pressuring when they have lagged. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry and his team were also quick to launch green diplomatic overtures in the region after the Biden administration took office in January.
But those appeals yielded few behavior changes from Latin America’s top two carbon emitters, Brazil and Mexico. Argentina is the region’s third-largest emitter, and past Argentine governments from Fernández’s Peronist political movement have often taken antagonistic positions toward Washington. Fernández, however, is more moderate, and he welcomed White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to Buenos Aires for talks last month.
For Argentina, speaking up on climate carries the potential not only to build ties with the United States but also to deepen regional relationships and seek investment for green initiatives. For Washington, next week’s event is evidence that persistence in climate diplomacy can pay off, as Kerry told Foreign Policy’s Michael Hirsh last month.
Kerry himself is slated to participate virtually, as is U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. While they may have been invited, Brazilian or Mexican officials are not mentioned in the most recent official event schedule.
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Talk versus action. At U.S. President Joe Biden’s virtual climate summit in April, Fernández announced a new commitment to increase the share of renewables in Argentina’s energy supply from around 10 percent—the current figure—to 30 percent by 2030. Months before, the country also updated its emissions goals as part of the Paris Agreement, which the watchdog Climate Action Tracker ranked as a modest gain: It moved Argentina’s progress on meeting the agreement’s targets from a rating of “critically insufficient” to “insufficient.”
Argentine energy analysts point out, however, that these new goals have yet to effectively translate into budgeting and policymaking. The country is devoting around 9 percent of its public spending this year to fossil fuel subsidies, according to María Marta Di Paola of the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation. That’s over 60 times the amount Buenos Aires plans to spend on a recently announced program to incentivize green development and alternative energy.
Earlier this year, Argentina’s Congress lowered—rather than raised—the amount of biofuels required to be mixed into diesel and gasoline. And environmental issues are so absent from campaigns for November’s legislative elections that activists have organized a social media drive pushing for debates to feature questions on the environment.
A developing country differential? In the past, Buenos Aires has argued that lower-income countries should be held to different emissions standards than rich countries given their need to develop their economies. That same ethos is on display today as Argentine officials stress that fracking in Vaca Muerta is a key step toward boosting export earnings and getting the country on the path to economic recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Even so, a quick look around Latin America turns up examples of how green industrial policy can also serve as an economic engine. Chile, for one, has heavily backed research into hydrogen fuel produced using renewable energy. Its first green hydrogen fuel station was just commissioned by the mining company Anglo American, and more than 40 percent of foreign direct investment to the country last year went to renewable energy.
Argentina has the solar and wind resources for a robust renewables industry. The question of how much they are harnessed to green the country’s energy mix is one of the political priorities that environmentalists hope can shift forward at next week’s event.
