The science is clear that fossil fuels need to go

The End is Near for Fossil Fuels: The UK Climate Change Team’s COP28 Report on Clean Energy Policy in the Light of Recent Climate Data

“It’s a brilliant turnaround from the text two days ago, and the negotiators have pulled a rabbit out of the hat,” says Piers Forster, interim chair of the Climate Change Committee in the UK. By dropping the controversial language, they were able to include the necessary transition away from fossil fuels this decade. The mandate to go home and deliver strong domestic policies for the changing world has been given by this.

This creates wiggle room that many leaders around the world — and particularly those representing countries that rely on fossil fuels to power their economies — are keen to exploit.

The Abu Dhabi National Oil company’s chief executive is a person named Al Jaber. The United States is headed by President Joe Biden. It supports calls for a phase out of fossil fuels, yet it takes record amounts of oil and gas out of the ground. India, led by PM Modi, is expanding renewable energy. Coal-burning power plants, which supplied almost three-quarters of the nation’s electricity last year, are still being built.

Wealthy countries are the ones who need to lead the way. Along with being able to slash emissions and drive down the costs of clean-energy technologies, this also involves helping the poor countries do their part. Despite the fact that world leaders have not come up with enough money.

When it comes to it, cleaner energy sources online appear to be inevitable. There were some notable new commitments on the clean energy front in the final texts coming out of COP28, too. Negotiating took place last week and more than 100 countries pledged to increase their renewable energy capacity by the year 2030. At a meeting in California in November, China and the US committed to working towards the same goal.

The world will likely overshoot the 1.5 C goal within the next few months. But there is nothing special about this threshold: this year’s climate extremes have made it all too clear that there is no truly safe level of warming, and every fraction of a degree matters. The main goal is to cut emissions as quickly as possible in order to head off the costs associated with global warming.

The new deal isn’t legally binding and cannot force any country to take action. Many politicians and environmentalists hoped it would be a message to investors and policymakers that the end is near for fossil fuels. Each nation is supposed to submit a formal plan for how it will curb greenhouse gas emissions over the next two years. Wednesday’s agreement is meant to guide those plans.

The room full of applauding negotiators were in the middle of the night and the early hours of Wednesday, when Mr. Al Hayer said that they worked for consensus. “I promised I would roll up my sleeves. The basis of the transformational change that we are making is there.

Climate Change Negotiation: What Can Be Learned from the First Round? A Critical Assessment of the U.A. Convention at the Eleventh Hour

There is a lot of science involved in these kinds of negotiations. The world, on average, is about 1.2 degrees Celsius 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.

There was no last-minute deal to tackle the planetary crisis 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 agreement that has to be agreed by every party at the conference 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. It’s the same situation for countries.