Clean Energy at the 28th Conference of the Parties, Conferencing on Climate Change, Paris Agreement, and COP28 (COP28) in Glasgow
Even so, there were hopeful signs last week when draft documents coming out of the conference included options to incorporate language that called on countries to phase out fossil fuel use (there was also an option not to include such a clause). Then the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) sent a letter to its member states pressuring them to “proactively reject any text or formula that targets energy i.e. fossil fuels rather than emissions.”
“It’s major,” says Lisa Schipper a developmental geographer at the University of Bonn, Germany. At COP 26 in Glasgow, delegates pledged to phase down unabated coal, which was considered as a first at the time.
The negotiators worked through the night and hours before a room full of applauding them on Wednesday morning. “I promised I would roll up my sleeves. We have the basis to make transformational change happen.”
“While nobody here will see their views completely reflected, the fact is that this document sends a very strong signal to the world,” US climate change envoy John Kerry said in a speech at the close of the conference. “We have to adhere to keeping 1.5 [degrees Celsius of warming] in reach,” he said, referring to the climate target set out in the Paris Agreement in 2015.
This was the closest a global deal has ever been to phase out the use of fossil fuels. The 28th Conference of the Parties, called theCOP28, was hosted by the United Nations and has gathered tens of thousands of delegates to wrangle over the past two weeks.
When it comes down to it, getting cleaner sources of energy online looks inevitable at this point. There were some new commitments on clean energy in the final text of the conference. It calls for the tripling of renewable energy capacity globally by 2030, something that more than 100 countries had already pledged to do while negotiations were taking place last week. The US and China, the top two greenhouse gas contributors, committed to work together to achieve the goal when they met in California ahead of the conference.
There is a lot of science in these kinds of negotiations. The world is currently 1.2 degrees hotter than it was before the industrial revolution. That might not sound like much, but it’s enough to drive more devastating hurricane and wildfire seasons, and suck drought-vulnerable places dry while displacing other communities faced with rising tides.
What would have been a historic deal to tackle a planetary crisis slipped out of reach at the eleventh hour. Even so, climate-vulnerable countries and environmental advocates scored some key wins with clean energy after heated climate negotiations wrapped up in the United Arab Emirates, a top oil- and gas-producing country.
The final text has to be agreed by every party at the conference, and this agreement is full of compromises that will leave many countries disappointed. “This was the best deal that was politically possible,” says Jennifer Allan, a senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Cardiff who is at COP28. The countries are not all that unhappy.
COP28 is the first global stocktake after the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement (COP21) in which representatives of more than 190 countries pledged to limit global warming to within 1.5 ºC degrees of pre-industrial levels.
The text agreed on Wednesday is in contrast to a version released on Monday that called for “reducing both consumption and production of fossil fuels”. That was criticized as not being strong enough in a rare sign of unity from the representatives from different parts of the globe.
However, delegates from the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) — which are among most vulnerable to climate change — said in a statement that they weren’t in the room when the final deal was agreed. “We were working hard to coordinate the 39 small island developing states that are disproportionately affected by climate change, and so were delayed in coming here.” AOSIS is advocating a target that would see global emissions peak by 2025.
“It is not enough for us to reference the science and then make agreements that ignore what the science is telling us we need to do. This approach is not an approach we should be asked to defend.
The principle for a loss and damage fund was agreed at a meeting last year. “We started the COP with this huge bang,” says Schipper. But she says that COP28 has otherwise been disappointing when it comes to promises on climate finance.
Romain Weikmans, who studies climate finance based at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, adds that “the big chunk of the climate finance” discussion will now take place next year at COP29, which will be in Baku, Azerbaijan.