The world was close to a deal to phase out fossil fuels
The UK Climate Change Committee “Puts a Little on the Hat”: The “Purpose for Change!” of Mr. Al Jaber
The negotiators have pulled a rabbit from the hat with the change in the text, says the interim chair of the Climate Change Committee in the UK. By abandoning controversial language about fossil fuels, they are able to include language about the necessary transition away from fossil fuels this decade. This gives all 198 countries the mandate to go home and deliver strong domestic policies to affect the transformative change.”
The final text calls on parties to be in a just, orderly and equitable manner, so that they can achieve net zero by the year 2050.
“Through the night and the early hours of the morning we worked collectively for consensus,” said Mr. Al Jaber on Wednesday morning before a room full of applauding negotiators. I would roll up my sleeves. transformational change can be made if we have the basis.
Climate Change Working Group Summary: Predictions for the 28 Years of the Paris Agreement and the Challenges for Climate-Vulnerable Countries and the United Arab Emirates
It’s why the Paris Agreement commits countries to working together to avoid two degrees of warming, ideally stopping temperatures from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius. Staying below that lower threshold requires slashing greenhouse gas emissions down to net zero as soon as possible. You have to sacrifice fossil fuels to get rid of greenhouse gas emissions.
The UN’s decision to hold the summit in the United Arab Emirates, a major oil and gas producer, wound up giving the fossil fuel industry unprecedented access. The climate conference held in the United Nations in the 28 years has convened it, there have been more fossil fuel lobbyists in the conference than in any other conference. Industry representatives for fossil fuels outnumbered delegations from every country present at the talks except the United Arab Emirates and Brazil. Al Jaber even used his position as COP28 president to lobby for oil and gas deals with other governments, according to an investigation by the BBC and the Centre for Climate Reporting.
The chances of getting cleaner sources of energy online are increasing. There were some new commitments in the final text from 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. When the US and China met in California to discuss climate change in November, they agreed to work together to keep global warming under control.
There’s a lot of science underpinning these kinds of negotiations. The world, on average, is about 1.2 degrees Celsius hotter than it was before the industrial revolution. It isn’t much, but it’s enough to drive more destructive hurricanes and fires, and suck dry places into the ocean.
What would have been a historic deal to tackle a planetary crisis slipped out of reach at the eleventh hour. Climate-vulnerable countries and environmental advocates scored some wins with clean energy after heated climate negotiations finished in the United Arab Emirate.
As the final text has to be agreed by every party at the conference, this agreement is full of compromises that will leave many countries disappointed. A lecturer in international relations at the University of Wales says that the deal was the best she had ever seen. The countries are as unhappy as each other.
Schipper says the text on how to give funds to countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change is vague. The meeting needed to set actual targets or specific financial commitments, but it did not do this. Schipper thinks that the text on climate adaptation is a very dangerous straitjacket for adaptation finance.
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”. Not being strong enough was criticized as a rare sign of unity 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.
The agreements that are made do not reflect the science that we need to do. This approach is not something that we should be asked to defend, according to its statement.
Climate finance in the COP29 agenda: Azerbaijan and New Physics from a new loss and damage fund for the most affected nations
This year’s COP meeting started optimistically with another historic deal in which rich countries pledged more than US$700 million to a new ‘loss and damage fund’ to support nations most affected by climate change. The pledge to triple renewable energy capacity was agreed by both sides.
The big portion of the discussion on climate finance will take place in Azerbaijan next year at the COP29 meeting according to Romain Weikmans.
