COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber was pushing for a reference to fossil fuels in the final conference declaration, and an Arabic tradition of dialogue had government ministers “getting real about what matters”, as United Nations climate negotiations in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) entered their second-last day.
On Sunday, Al Jaber “nailed his colours to the mast on the key issue of this COP—that the final text should have language addressing consumption of all fossil fuels for the first time,” Bloomberg News reported.
“We need to find consensus and common ground on fossil fuel,” Al Jaber told an impromptu media briefing.
To date, “more than 100 countries have said they’d support a phaseout of fossil fuels, but many, including leading oil producers remain opposed,” Bloomberg said. “The hope is to forge a compromise by switching to the softer ‘phase down’, and using adjectives like ‘unabated’ and ‘orderly’,” a purported compromise that Al Jaber tried hard to sell in the months leading up to the COP.
But that language would be anathema to countries and civil society campaigners who’ve spent the last 10 days in Dubai, and the weeks and months leading up, pushing for a firm, definitive commitment to end fossil fuels.
“The myth of ‘abated fossil fuels’ is nothing more than greenwashing,” Nikki Reisch, climate and energy program director at the Center for International Energy Law, told The Energy Mix in an emailed statement.
“No amount of carbon capture or offsets can make fossil fuels climate-friendly,” Reisch said. “The only thing that will prevent climate breakdown is a full, fair, fast, and funded phaseout of all fossil fuels. New oil and gas projects approved on the promise of abatement won’t be unbuilt when they fail to capture their emissions. Not only will we have locked in more fossil fuels and more climate chaos, we will have lost the one thing we don’t have—time.”
Less than 48 hours before the scheduled end of the COP, time on an even tighter scale was Al Jaber’s most immediate problem. Bloomberg said the COP28 president “appears to be some way off” on both of his major goals—to deliver an ambitious outcome at the end of the conference, and (even more improbably) to tie up negotiations by noon Tuesday, local time.
“The time has come for all parties to constructively engage and to come to me with that language [on the future of fossil fuels],” he said. “I want everyone to show flexibility, to act with urgency, and to find the common ground.”
That was some time after observers had begun raising alarms about the slow pace of negotiations, noting that Al Jaber’s “North Star” of centring the whole process on a 1.5°C climate goal had been excised from a key section of text dealing with the Global Stocktake. The pledge to triple global renewable energy capacity and double the pace of energy efficiency improvements by 2030, already adopted by 130 countries but not yet finalized in the COP declaration, had been replaced with a commitment to “strategically replace fossil fuel capacity”. A new reference to “transitional fuels” was seen as a possible entry point for continuing expansion of natural gas infrastructure. And new draft language on climate finance appeared to place the onus on developing countries to attract the cash, rather than holding rich countries accountable for supplying it.
48 Hours to Go
In a bid to get things moving, Al Jaber introduced negotiators to “a different kind of meeting: a majlis, an Arabian-style conference, where participants sit in a circle and are encouraged to speak freely,” Bloomberg wrote. According to one veteran COP delegate, the result was powerful.
“In eight years of attending climate talks, I have never felt so much like we’re getting real about what matters. It’s kind of blowing my mind,” wrote Destination Zero Executive Director Catherine Abreu. “Day 11 of #COP28, and the Arabic tradition of majlis has Ministers talking straight about the realities of phasing out fossil fuels.”
In a long Twitter thread, Abreu recapped some of the results. The European Union representative said there’s no choice but to follow the science of climate change to a 1.5°C outcome and phase out fossil fuels, while recognizing the economic challenges in the transition. The representative called for a limited role for carbon abatement technology, focused on the sectors of industry that will need it most, and stressed that the transition must deliver energy access for all and fight energy poverty.
Then the COP President “encourages Ministers to speak from their heart, and Colombia comes right in to do just that,” Abreu recounted.
“When we made the commitment to transition our economy away from fossil fuel production, which has ruined other sectors of our economy, we thought we would be able to bring that commitment into this process. But rather we have been confronted with the reality of power,” Abreu wrote, paraphrasing Colombia’s intervention. “Who is going to triple renewable energy? Those who have access to capital at 5% or at 30%? Where is the equity when we have to access capital with such high interest rates?”
Then Colombia expressed empathy for the challenge ahead for Saudi Arabia, perhaps the world’s leading petro-state. “What is the response from the world to the fact that they need to transition an entire economy dependent on fossil fuels?” the delegate asked.
Abreu’s reaction: “We often call [the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] out for blocking tactics; this expression of care brings tears to my eyes.”
Earlier, there were indeed reports that Saudi Arabia was “piling pressure” on the UAE to shift the focus of the conference away from oil and gas. “A Gulf official said the Saudis were not happy with the way the UAE was handling the discussions in Dubai,” the Financial Times reported. “The Saudi-dominated OPEC oil cartel has also complained that the talks are seeking to exert ‘undue and disproportionate pressure against fossil fuels’, prompting a backlash from European ministers.”
Decision Text Expected Monday
Following the majlis, the COP28 secretariat was expected to release a first draft of the final conference communiqué Monday. (Given the 7½- to 12-hour time difference for Canadian readers, the document may be out by the time you read this.) With key elements of the final agreement on the Global Stocktake, climate change adaptation, and a just transition off fossil fuels still largely unformed, some observers saw that as a late delivery, given that final declarations normally go through two or three drafts before they’re finalized.
Carbon Brief Editor-in-Chief Simon Evans published a chart Sunday afternoon showing how much ground the COP still had to cover.
Also on Sunday:
• The UK’s Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) reported slow progress on the Stocktake, which is “widely recognized as key to keeping 1.5°C alive as an achievable goal.” The dispatch cited “wide gaps between the parties” on shorter-term emission cuts this decade, and noted that negotiations on climate adaptation and finance were still preliminary for such a late stage in the COP.
• Those gaps in the negotiations had vulnerable countries “desperately trying to salvage a deal on adaptation after nine days of stalemate,” Climate Home News reported. After a “two-year-long exercise to turn the vague provisions of the Paris Agreement into something more concrete,” the expectation had been that “clear definitions and targets will unlock money for adaptation that has been chronically underfunded.”
But negotiations bogged down, amid suspicions that an agreement on adaptation was being “held hostage to talks over a possible fossil fuel phaseout,” Climate Home wrote.
“We’ve invested so much time and energy in this process,” one negotiator from a vulnerable country told Climate Home. “We’re now facing a very scary scenario: either no decision at all or a take-it-or-leave-it text creating a very symbolic framework.”
“We are in an adaptation emergency and our vulnerable populations are suffering,” said Ephraim Mwepya Shitima of Zambia, who’s leading the African Group negotiating bloc. “Adaptation is a matter of survival for us in Africa, it is a life and death issue. We need action and finance to help us adapt with this changing climate, otherwise how will we cope with the severe droughts, the devastating storms, and the rising seas which threaten our very lives?”
• Veteran climate envoy Xie Zhenhua said China would like to see fossil fuels phased out in tandem with the rise of renewable energy, but didn’t indicate whether his country would support language calling for a fossil fuel phaseout. “We had this language which said that both China and the U.S. will massively promote renewable energy deployment and use it to gradually and orderly substitute oil, gas, and coal power generation, so that we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Xie said, referring to a pre-COP cooperation agreement between the world’s two biggest climate polluters.
• In a joint statement on climate, nature, and people, led by the presidents of COP28 and last year’s COP15 biodiversity summit, a handful of countries committed to coordinate their actions across the two concurrent crises and scale up financing for both. The list of signatories included Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, ECUI wrote. Greenpeace Canada welcomed the news, and Canada’s Environment and Climate Minister Steven Guilbeault committed to introduce a nature accountability bill next year.
The Big Switch: From Aspiration to Must-Do
On Friday, coming into the final phase of the COP, UN Climate Secretary Simon Stiell had issued a stern warning to delegates.
“COP28 must deliver a big switch: not just ‘what’ governments must do, but also ‘how’ to get the job done,” he said. “The technologies and tools all exist. This week negotiators must agree on putting them to work. In short, it’s go-time for governments at COP28 this week.”
On so many of the key issues on the COP agenda, Stiell said, there were still multiple options on the table that represented faster or slower action on climate impacts and solutions. “If we want to save lives now, and keep 1.5°C within reach, the highest ambition COP outcomes must stay front and centre in these negotiations,” he told participants. “So I urge negotiators to start with the highest ambition outcome and for them to ask, ‘How do we get there?’ Yes, compromises will be essential. But not on ambition.”
A day later, Stiell was back on the podium, urging negotiators to deliver “a climate action surge now, and a springboard for the crucial years ahead”. That momentum should start with the targets countries have already set for 2030 and climate finance as the “great enabler” for “ongoing acceleration,” particularly in the Global South..
That means it’s “high time we stop thinking of halving emissions as a some nice-to-do aspiration,” Stiell said. “It must become a must-do if we are to keep the global economy functioning, and protect billions of human lives.”
But by then, the Friday edition of ECO, the daily COP newsletter produced by Climate Action Network-International, was already spotlighting climate change adaptation and mitigation as crucial discussion streams that were falling far short on their mandates.
Derailing Climate Adaptation
During a tense negotiating session Wednesday on the COP’s Global Goal for Adaptation (GGA), civil society observers “watched in horror as the adaptation negotiations collapsed in front of our eyes” and an earlier spirit of collaboration “vanished into thin air,” ECO wrote [pdf].
“Certain countries—seemingly committed to derailing the adaptation agenda—effectively hijacked the negotiation process not just in relation to the GGA, but across the entire spectrum of the adaptation negotiations,” the newsletter added, haggling over text formatting while refusing to engage on the substance of the text.
“Adaptation still appears to be nowhere,” the ECIU agreed in its December 8 update. Coming to the end of the hottest year on record, “some parties are barely picking up the text to glance it over… never mind engaging and moving towards a possible agreement.”
On Sunday morning, ECO framed [pdf] the GGA as an integral part of the wider COP negotiation.
“The GGA framework is a tool for all—communities, parties, stakeholder—to enhance our collective capacity. Without it, we risk not fulfilling the Paris Agreement,” the authors warned. “The GGA embodies climate multilateralism, listening to and providing solutions for the most vulnerable,” and it “helps form a larger tapestry, weaving into the threads of other international agreements and initiatives.”
On Friday, the Global Climate and Health Alliance (GCHA) pointed to another serious gap in the adaptation text.
“Including targets for health actions and outcomes in the Global Goal on Adaptation during COP28 would mean that low- and middle-income countries are best equipped to adapt to a changing climate, and lets us measure whether their health systems are ready to withstand the impacts they are facing,” said Executive Director Dr. Jeni Miller. “Omitting these targets would not only have grave implications for the well-being of people living in these countries, it would have global implications.”
The GCHA said United States, the European Union, Japan, and Australia have opposed a GGA that includes clear health targets, even though “infectious disease outbreaks in countries without resilient health systems pose a threat both locally to populations in the affected country, and to global health security, as we have recently seen.”
Redirecting Fossil Subsidies
Elsewhere at the COP, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said countries could find the cash to address the climate emergency by ending trillions of dollars per year in fossil fuel subsidies and placing an “implicit price” on carbon emissions, while U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said his country must end its own fossil subsidies to meet its own climate goals. “The subsidies are crazy, and we have them still in the United States,” Kerry told a Politico podcast. “President [Joe] Biden has said we’ve gotta get rid of these subsidies. But again… you have to legislate to do that, and we’ve been pretty gridlocked in our country for a period of time.”
ECIU’s quote of the day December 8 went to Andrew Forrest, former CEO and now non-executive chair of Australian industrial giant Fortescue Metals.
“We need just a simple understanding that there’s only one question we should ask, which is: when are you going to stop burning fossil fuel?” Forrest said. “Any industrialist, any politician should receive that simple question. Not ‘what’s your net [zero] 2050 plan’ or ‘what is your going greener plan’, or any of that whitewash.”
With more than three billion people already exposed to the impacts of climate change, “the time for excuses and prevarication is over,” Forrest said. “We have the solutions to phase out fossil fuel, and this is where we must go. If you say you can’t, then maybe you’re right—you can’t. But now’s the time for you to leave the stage and bring on someone who will.”
Meanwhile, “if you’re looking to put a head on a spike when lethal humidity really hits, well, start with mine,” he added. “But don’t let off the other 999 who may not have acted as quickly as we have. I include myself in that because I’m not pointing the finger at everyone else, I’m saying I’m part of the problem, too. But at least I’m changing.”
