This story has been updated.
More than 100 countries signed a global clean energy pledge, COP28 organizers touted an ambitious but voluntary methane reduction promise by oil and gas companies, and fossil fuel phaseout language faced steady opposition on the third day of United Nations climate talks in Dubai.
Hours ago, 118 countries including Canada, Australia, Barbados, Brazil, Chile, Japan, and Nigeria signed a pledge led by the European Union, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States to triple global renewable energy capacity to 11,000 gigawatts and double the annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030. “The pledge was among a slew of COP28 announcements on Saturday aimed at decarbonizing the energy sector—source of around three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions—that included expanding nuclear power, cutting methane emissions, and choking off private finance for coal power,” Reuters reports.
In parallel with the renewables pledge, “fossil fuel demand and supply must phase-down this decade to keep 1.5°C within reach,” the COP28 secretariat and the International Energy Agency add, in a summary of the discussions leading up to today’s announcements. Those discussions called on fossil industries to “decarbonize existing operations whilst increasing investment in renewable and low-carbon alternatives.”
Renewables Boost Would Unlock Fossil Reductions
In the lead-up to the COP, “there was a strong consensus that climate finance and clean investment will need to be significantly scaled up, with the IEA estimating US$4.5 trillion will be needed annually by the early 2030s,” the secretariat and the IEA state. “Governments, alongside public and private financial institutions, must deliver assistance to de-risk investments and reduce the cost of capital.”
But the pledge won’t make it into the final COP28 declaration unless all 195 of the countries taking part in negotiations adopt it by consensus. Neither China nor India signed today pledge, although both have “signalled support,” the news agency writes. Both countries have been working to ramp up renewable energy deployment, with China running ahead of its published targets.
“China is well on the way to delivering its previous pledge of 1,200 GW of renewables by 2030 up to six years early, so for China to treble its cumulative efforts by 2030 is entirely feasible, given the phenomenal momentum that is already well under way,” said Tim Buckley, director of the Climate Energy Finance think tank.
Kenyan diplomat Adnan Amin, former director general of the International Renewable Energy Agency, said the renewable energy and efficiency deal includes reports back to an annual meeting of ministers “to take stock of meeting and hopefully exceeding the target.” He told media he had “strong confidence” the renewables and efficiency pledge would make it into the final COP declaration.
The pledge received mostly positive initial reviews—as long as the target receives official COP28 endorsement, and the financing is in place to implement it.
“Tripling renewables and doubling efficiency are the two biggest global actions needed to cut CO2 emissions this decade,” Dave Jones, global insights lead at the Ember clean energy think tank, said in a release. “If the efficiency goal is achieved, then for the first time in history economic growth will be uncoupled from energy demand growth on a global scale. The tripling goal would take renewables to the next level, with solar and wind reaching 40% of global electricity generation by 2030.”
Those two measures combined “would unlock deep economy-wide fossil fuel reductions and ensure that oil, coal, and gas demand not only peak this decade but see a meaningful fall,” Jones said.
“Achieving consensus from over 100 countries to significantly step up renewables ambition sends an unprecedented market signal that solar and wind are unstoppable,” added Global Solar Council CEO Sonia Dunlop. “But an ambitious pledge doesn’t mean anything if it isn’t backed by legally binding actions and accountability.”
Countries on the front lines of the climate emergency were looking for the renewable energy pledge to be paired with a commitment to phase out fossil fuels, while developing nations said they would need more investment to get renewable energy pledges on the ground. Over the last two decades, Africa has received only 2% of the money flowing into renewables globally, Reuters says, citing the International Renewable Energy Agency.
Today’s pledge “is only half the solution. The pledge can’t greenwash countries that are simultaneously expanding fossil fuel production,” said Marshall Islands climate envoy Tina Stege.
“The mismatch still exists between our potentiality and our limitations to attract investment,” said Najib Ahmed, a consultant at Somalia’s climate ministry.
Are We Decarbonizing Yet?
The renewable energy and energy efficiency pledge was one of three components of a Global Decarbonization Accelerator (GDA) that the COP28 Presidency announced with great fanfare on Saturday. The other two elements are rapid action to decarbonize the existing energy system, largely by focusing on high-emitting industries like cement and steel, and a voluntary Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter that has 50 of the world’s biggest fossil producers, including 29 national oil and gas companies, promising to essentially phase out methane emissions and end routine gas flaring by 2030.
The third pillar of the plan also includes a pledge to reduce emissions from global cooling by 68% by 2050, to which 52 countries have signed on. Officials said that promise is particularly meaningful in the Gulf region, where the COP is taking place, and where summer temperatures already reach of exceed 50°C.
The Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter received scorching criticism from a list of 320 civil society organizations, led by Oil Change International, that called for a “robust negotiated energy package” in the final COP decision. That would include “an unambiguous agreement to end all new oil and gas expansion, a clear call to equitably and rapidly phase out all fossil fuels, and a commitment to triple deployment of nature-positive and community-beneficial renewable energy and double energy efficiency.”
But on Saturday afternoon in Dubai, a media panel still touted the voluntary deal as a major step forward.
“What we’ve achieved so far is that 50 very significant oil and gas signatories have joined,” Amin said, including the 29 national oil companies. “That in itself is highly significant,” he added, since state-owned fossils have not been deeply involved with decarbonization efforts until now.
The decarbonization accelerator “represents an inflection point for addressing various challenges that to date have slowed down the energy transition,” COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber said in a release. “Each initiative is underpinned by ongoing accountability frameworks to ensure that the commitments made, are commitments delivered.”
‘The Most Impactful Day’
Fred Krupp, president of the U.S. Environmental Defense Fund, said the GDA, coupled with the methane announcement from China and the United States leading up to the COP could make Saturday “the most impactful day of announcements” in nearly 30 years of COP negotiations. “This new initiative, if, if, the commitments are met, has the potential to reduce methane emissions by each of the companies signing up by an average of 80-90%,” he told media.
UPDATE: In a second bombshell news exposé Sunday morning, The UK-based Centre for Climate Reporting and the British Broadcasting Corporation reported public comments in which Al Jaber pushed back forcefully against the science supporting a fossil fuel phaseout. “Al Jaber made the comments in ill-tempered responses to questions from Mary Robinson, the chair of the Elders group and a former UN special envoy for climate change, during a live online event on 21 November,” The Guardian reports.
“We’re in an absolute crisis that is hurting women and children more than anyone,” Robinson said during a She Changes Climate event, “and it’s because we have not yet committed to phasing out fossil fuel. That is the one decision that COP28 can take and in many ways, because you’re head of ADNOC, you could actually take it with more credibility.”
“I accepted to come to this meeting to have a sober and mature conversation. I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C,” Al Jaber replied.
“Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phaseout of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socio-economic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”
We’ll have more detail and reaction to this story in our reporting today (December 4).
The list of signatories in the release from the COP Presidency includes national oil companies like the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), Equinor, Petrobras, Petronas, Saudi Aramco and privately-owned fossils like BP, Crescent Petroleum, Eni, ExxonMobil, Lukoil, Mitsui, Occidental Petroleum, Repsol, Shell, TotalÉnergies, and Woodside Energy—many of which are involved in the new extraction projects the civil society groups highlighted in their release.
Krupp stressed the importance of a new $40-million “accountability partnership”, funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, to help the IEA and the UN Environment Programme hold fossil companies to their methane reduction promises. “The oil and gas industry can and must do more to develop, deploy, and invest in the clean energy technologies of the future,” he said. “In this respect, the oil and gas industry is still falling woefully short.”
But “we have it within our power to drastically slow the rate of warming in our lifetime by the relatively simple acts of finding and fixing methane leaks and ending routine flaring of gas, which is wasteful of an energy resource as well as a powerful climate pollutant,” he added. Methane is 80 to 85 times more potent a greenhouse gas then carbon dioxide over the crucial 20-year span when humanity will be scrambling to get climate change under control. And with the rise of independent satellite monitoring, Krupp said, countries and international agencies will have a window on whether big emitters are following through on their promises.
“No longer do we have to settle for taking anyone’s word for it.”
Krupp recalled a moment at a private meeting in Abu Dhabi where Al Jaber, who famously assumed the COP Presidency while serving as CEO of ADNOC, convened his industry peers in late September.
Looking ahead to the COP, “he said this could be the companies’ last chance to demonstrate that they could step up and do what needed to be done, to at least take a big step,” Krupp recounted. “He talked about methane as an element of these reductions,” and “at the end of this talk he said, ‘I need you. I need your support. I need you to sign up. Are you with me? Are you in or are you out?’”
The room was “entirely silent,” Krupp said. “The hair was standing up on the back of my neck.” Then at the end of the day, after several hours of side meetings, Krupp said he had a chance to ask Al Jaber how the industry executives had responded. “He picked up his phone and he pointed it at me and he said, ‘Fred, my phone has been lighting up all day. They’re telling me they are in.’”
Earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change flagged methane controls along with solar and wind deployment as the quickest pathways to deeper emission cuts, mostly at a cost of less than US$20 per tonne of carbon dioxide or equivalent.
Rough Road for Fossil Phaseout
While the different elements of the Global Decarbonization Accelerator took centre stage during Saturday deliberations at the COP, a commitment to phase out fossil fuels is facing a rougher road with negotiators.
“Deciding how to describe the shift away from coal, oil and gas—the primary drivers of climate change—is one of the top political issues at this year’s talks,” Politico writes. “The debate largely fixates on whether to phase those fuels ‘out’ versus ‘down’, whether the word choice makes a practical difference, and whether nations should set deadlines for ditching their polluting energy sources.”
At COP negotiations, proposals and counter-proposals take the form of draft text that is circulated among the countries for debate. On Friday, a set of “textual building blocks” [pdf] released by the co-chairs of one of the negotiating streams tabled a draft that “opens the possibility of phasing out all fossil fuels,” reported Climate Home News. “Other options are to ‘phase down’ all fossil fuels, to focus purely on coal, or to say nothing at all. The coin is in the air.”
The draft also includes language covering fossil fuel subsidies, carbon management and removal, the role of “transitional fuels”, timelines for zero-emission shipping and aviation, and the importance of a just energy transition.
The 12-page text “acknowledges partial progress but emphasizes the failure to align with the target of limiting warming to 2°C, ideally 1.5°C,” the We Don’t Have Time campaign wrote yesterday in its daily COP update. “Russia opposes any ‘phase out’ language, citing economic discrimination, while the COP28 presidency leans towards a ‘phase down’.”
Politico says the European Union and vulnerable countries support a fossil phase out, and Business Green reports that more than 200 businesses are backing them up. But COP28 organizers “have warned it may be diplomatically impractical to call for the complete end of fossil fuel use from the almost 200 countries present—including major oil and gas producers like the UAE,” Politico says.
“Some observers warned that such a push could expend much-needed political capital in a fight over wording that may not actually compel nations to do anything differently,” when “what matters is the actions countries take outside the conference.”
The counter-argument is that more definite language in a COP declaration sends a stronger message to countries, businesses, the finance sector, and other key decision-makers that the “direction of travel”, in COP-speak, is shifting.
“If we do not signal the terminal decline of the fossil fuel era as we know it, we welcome our own terminal decline,” UN climate secretary Simon Stiell told the opening plenary of the conference Thursday. “And we choose to pay with people’s lives.”
“Words matter. And it sends signals,” EU special climate envoy Anthony Agotha told an event in November. “It sends signals to people. It sends signals to markets.”
‘Climate Collapse in Real Time’
Earlier in the conference, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported another warmest year on record, with average global temperatures through the end of October landing 1.4°C above the pre-industrial average.
“Greenhouse gas levels are record high. Global temperatures are record high. Sea level rise is record high. Antarctic sea ice is record low,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said Thursday. “It’s a deafening cacophony of broken records.”
Those results show that “we are living through climate collapse in real time,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres told COP participants Friday.
“This year has seen communities around the world pounded by fires, floods, and searing temperature—and the impact is devastating,” he added. “Record global heating should send shivers down the spines of world leaders. And it should trigger them to act.”
COP Notebook
• By late Saturday, pledges to the loss and damage fund unveiled on the first day of the conference had hit about US$660 million. That total was “a great start establishing the principle of developed nations supporting developing countries” in dealing with the “escalating costs of loss and damage,” wrote the UK’s Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).
But it was “also causing concerns amongst some parties that success on loss and damage might be banked by some parties as letting them off the hook for upping adaptation finance and—the big deal ahead in Dubai—on phaseout of fossil fuels.”
• U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris announced a $3-billion pledge to the UN’s Green Climate Fund (GCF), an amount that would bring the troubled fund to the “highest capitalization it has ever had,” Kenyan diplomat Adnan Amin told media Saturday. The catch, said Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists, is that the funding must now be approved by the U.S. Congress.
“Congress must now step up to appropriate the funding to ensure this pledge is fully realized, and the funding is delivered quickly,” Cleetus said in a release. And “while today’s GCF pledge alongside other US climate finance commitments are a significant start, President Biden’s promise to marshal $11.4 billion annually by 2024 is an important benchmark that must also be fulfilled.”
Climate hawks were quick to point that, at $12.3 billion with the U.S. contribution accounted for, the GCF falls far short of what’s needed, and doesn’t begin to approach developed countries’ historical responsibility for climate pollution.
• An explosive news exposé revealing that the COP28 secretariat was trying to combine pre-COP negotiations with private oil and gas deals prompted Hilda Heine, a former president of the Marshall Islands, to resign her position on the COP 28 advisory board. “These actions undermine the integrity of the COP presidency and the process as a whole,” she said, after Al Jaber angrily denied that he had known about our used the talking points prepared by COP staff.
• The COP Presidency said more than 130 countries had signed a pledge to make food and agriculture a priority in their national climate plans. That’s “a big deal, and the first declaration on food systems, despite the global food system accounting for roughly a third of our greenhouse gas emissions, and food chains increasingly threatened by climate impacts,” ECIU said.
• Brazil set out to raise $250 billion for a Tropical Forest Forever Facility, aimed at “protecting standing tropical forests in up to 80 countries,” the Brazilian government said in a release.
“Tropical forests provide an array of ecosystem services beyond carbon,” said Environment and Climate Minister Marine Silva. “The proposal recognizes the role of tropical rainforest conservation for biodiversity, carbon capture, and cooling effects, as well as its importance for social and economic development.”
• The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty announced that Colombia had become the first Latin American country and the largest producer of coal and gas to join the treaty push, and the Nassau Guardian was one of three newspapers urging Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis to follow suit. The treaty secretariat also declared an “historic milestone” Friday as 100 cities and sub-national governments issued a joint call to national governments.
• The Powering Past Coal Alliance welcomed the United States, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, the Dominican Republic, Iceland, Kosovo, and Norway as new members.
