At the conclusion of the COP28 United Nations climate change conference in Dubai on Wednesday, news accounts and statements from the officials overseeing the confab hailed a breakthrough success: For the first time, an international agreement on climate change called for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems.”
Global policy in the next few decades will determine whether humanity will breach the threshold of catastrophic climate change.
COP28 “announced the global and irreversible trend toward a green, low-carbon transition,” said Zhao Yingming, China’s vice minister of ecology and environment.
Climate activists in the United Arab Emirates had been pushing hard toward this outcome with protests and even acts of civil disobedience.
Their success was the culmination of yearslong effort. Last year, at COP27 in Sharm-el Sheikh, Egypt, it was considered a major breakthrough when the United States finally embraced language that called for a “phase down” of “unabated” fossil fuels. (“Unabated” means without technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions, known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS.) This year, in a state flush with oil money, they managed to get much stronger wording.
But that’s all it is: words. Global policy in the next few decades will determine whether humanity will breach the threshold of catastrophic climate change — which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says is 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming over pre-industrial levels — and will be a settled question well before the phaseout of fossil fuels is complete.
The world has already experienced 1.2℃ of warming, having just endured the hottest year on record and a cascade of climate change-related extreme weather events. The IPCC calculates that to stay below 1.5℃ of warming, global greenhouse gas emissions must drop 43% by 2030, 60% by 2035 and reach net-zero by 2050.
We’re nowhere near that trajectory — and COP28 didn’t bring us all that much closer to it. Last month, the U.N. Environment Program released an analysis that found current policies leave us on pace for a 3% increase in emissions by the end of this decade. Although roughly 130 nations made new pledges to cut emissions at COP28, the International Energy Agency estimates that all of those pledges, if fully implemented, would close less than one-third of the “emissions gap.”
How close countries get to those emission reduction targets should be the primary measure of success, or lack thereof. And by that standard, COP28 came up short. The national emissions reduction plans from major emitters such as China, Australia, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. remain insufficient, according to expert analyses.
The outcome suggests there is a considerable role for dangerous distractions such as large-scale carbon capture and storage and transitional fuels.”
Manuel pulgar-vidal World wildlife fund
At COP29 next year, activists may be tempted to direct their energies toward strengthening the language on fossil fuels, which some still find lacking. The phrase “transition away” was a compromise between nations that back the call for a total “phaseout” and oil- and gas-rich states such as the host country, UAE. There also is no specified timeline for the transition, and the agreement endorses carbon capture as a near-term alternative.
“The outcome suggests there is a considerable role for dangerous distractions such as large-scale carbon capture and storage and transitional fuels,” said Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, global climate and energy lead for the World Wildlife Fund.
But symbolic statements declaring war on fossil fuels should not be the main focus of climate activism. Ultimately, climate change isn’t about fossil fuels per se, it’s about emissions. Fossil fuels are the overwhelming source of emissions, but it’s possible to imagine a future in which catastrophic climate change is averted by limiting fossil fuel use to a few hard-to-electrify sectors, such as shipping, aviation or steel and cement production. If the emissions from those activities are captured and stored — or if the companies that produce those emissions are required to remove and store an equivalent amount of carbon from the atmosphere — then the world can actually reach net-zero emissions. In fact, the U.S.’s first commercial carbon removal plants recently opened.
On the other hand, it is impossible to stay below 1.5℃ of warming if countries don’t make the necessary emissions cuts by rapidly dropping fossil fuels from the biggest sources of emissions, which are also the easiest to decarbonize: switching from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, replacing boilers with electric heat pumps, and generating electricity from clean sources like wind and solar energy instead of gas and coal.
The focus on fossil fuels is understandable, in part because the harm they cause goes far beyond climate change. Oil and gas drilling and coal mining wreak ecological havoc on the communities where they occur, befouling the air and water, killing animals — and even sometimes people. Transporting fossil fuels is dangerous and can cause disasters when they spill or ignite. And when they are burned, they emit other forms of air pollution in addition to CO2.
One reason fossil fuels have become such a fixation is a commendable commitment among climate activists to environmental justice. Low-income communities, especially Indigenous communities, are disproportionately likely to live in or near areas that have been sacrificed to the production of fossil fuels.
Unfortunately, these same problems occur in virtually every form of natural resource extraction. Cobalt, for instance, is essential for electric car batteries, and mining for it in Congo has led to toxic dumping that is polluting water and contaminating crops.
All environmental degradation should be minimized, while a balance must be struck with the need to raise living standards, especially in developing countries.
Unlike conventional pollution, however, climate change is a rapidly accelerating worldwide emergency, for which aspirational rhetoric about the long-term elimination of fossil fuels is a less urgent priority than immediately getting emissions on a steep-enough downward path. Hopefully, the next climate agreement will make more progress on that.