COP28
COP 28 arrived at the end of the hottest year on record, according to the latest report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). As António Guterres, secretary- general of the UN, put it, "Greenhouse gas levels are record high. Global temperatures are record high. Sea level rise is record high. Antarctic sea ice is record low. It's a deafening cacophony of broken records''.
On this basis alone, some see COP28 as a case of Nero fiddling while Rome literally burns.
COP has come to be a benchmark for international progress on wonky climate change policy—not a hotbed of controversy-- but COP 28 was already a little scandalous before it started. A mega-event with 100,000 attendees, all of whom will have flown there to stay in air-conditioned buildings built with imported materials, and in view of one of the largest petroleum processing facilities in the world, its carbon footprint came up for criticism. So did the high proportion of attendees from meat, dairy, oil and gas industries, and so did the choice of chair (who is also the CEO of one of the biggest petroleum companies in the world).
Some like Greta felt that COP 28 crossed an untenable line from the get-go. Others argued that every COP provides a unique situation where many parties are in the room at one time, so agreements can be made that far outweigh the carbon footprint. Moreover, having the conference in a petro-state, presided over by petro- interests, meant that other petro-states might play ball.
In the end, the “realists” were right in some respects and the “purists” right in others. COP 28 moved the dial a tiny but significant amount in that all nations agreed in principle to a “transition away from fossil fuels”, something that even Saudi Arabia had to bow to in the end, lest they look like the criminal in the room. But those of us working in this sector seem to be fairly uniformly cynical about the fact that the agreement has no actual targets, and the language focuses on “the use of fossil fuels in energy systems” which could be seen as an unduly narrow reading of what is needed to curb temperature rise to 1.5C. Some concern has been raised that only “unabated” coal power will be phased down. This means that carbon capture could be emphasised leaving suppliers to carry on supplying coal—whereas widespread carbon capture is something that most agree is completely unrealistic in the short term and even a long way from being a practical solution for the long term. But this agreement is what was possible at this COP, and any expectation of an agreement to phase out fossil fuels completely would be, according to the Economist, “economically infeasible and politically naive. COP operates by consensus, meaning that the big petrostates had a veto on any deal. Moreover, fossil fuels are likely to remain part of the energy mix for decades to come. Even optimistic forecasts predict a substantial role for oil and gas, balanced by technologies that remove their greenhouse-gas emissions, in scenarios for the world to achieve net zero by 2050. Although clean energy has made vast strides, it is unlikely to displace fossil fuels fully by then.”
Looking at the choices that consumers have made since climate change started to loom into view, and the lack of progress made in changing the public consensus on anything substantial, this seems completely correct. For every person buying an electric car, there seems to be another buying a monster SUV. Young people going vegan eat plastic-packaged ready meals by the truckload. Global air travel miles have exploded. If there is a shift towards a more environmentally-sound way of living, it has been incremental and probably sequestered in very specific socio-economic groups.
There is some good news from COP, of course. There were around 800 papers lodged at this conference and numerous agreements focusing on specific objectives. Some of those may have significant impact going forward.
Probably the biggest of these is the agreement on methane. According to the Economist: “The adopted target, to cut methane emissions by an order of magnitude, to a mere 0.2% or so of oil and gas production by the end of the decade, is both ambitious and precise. Progress will be independently verified by third parties, including the UN Environment Programme. “
Some more out-takes:
recommendations for crucial guidance on greenhouse gas removals and mechanism methodologies –dull but very important
For the first time since the Paris Accords, negotiators assembled at COP28 will conduct a “global stocktake” to measure how much progress they’ve made
A first stab at creating a fund for developing countries to adapt to climate-driven changes –though at the time of writing this blog, less than $1 billion US had been committed. (The UN estimates $387 billion is needed)
Others will point to key diplomatic cooperation that may signal greater unity on climate policy between hitherto-opposed countries going forward—again perhaps dull and not headline-grabbing but crucial—a good example of this is the cooperation between America and China ahead of the summit helping to lay the groundwork on the methane agreement.
The over-riding fact however is that for the ‘headline’ agreement coming out of COP 28, especially in a year full of warning bells on climate, to come across as almost a ‘so what’, is really pretty terrible. In order to understand that it has any significance whatsoever, one needs to know just how poorly countries have done so far at cooperating at all on climate change. It feels like groundhog day to this interested observer. How are we not much, much further along than this?
Several reports (from Unep,and UN Climate Change amongst others) published prior to COP found that existing national pledges to cut emissions would mean global emissions in 2030 will be 2% below 2019 levels, rather than the 43% cut required to limit global heating to 1.5C.
Virtually all of the G20—countries with the potential to make impactful policy change—are failing to meet their goals. A review of climate policies found that the UK’s are “highly insufficient” (no big surprise there) in a G20 ranging from “insufficient” to “critically insufficient.”
“Governments are taking baby steps to avert the climate crisis – they [must] make bold strides forward at Cop28 in Dubai to get on track,” said Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of UN Climate Change.
And that’s not what we saw at COP 28.
Looking at the alarming lack of progress it seems foolish to wait for the politicians and diplomats to get their skates on. As Yuval Noah Hariri has noted, virtually all of our biggest problems (migration, the next pandemic, plastic pollution, and so forth) require international cooperation at an unprecedented scale and there isn’t much evidence that our existing political and economic systems can provide that.
So, while COP 28 is very important in terms of understanding the scale of the problem and the progress made towards reaching an international consensus on what the problem even is, it is not going to save the planet. Indeed, I wonder if we haven’t reached a moral turning point where we can no longer rely on external entities to make the right decisions for our futures. After all, the root problem is the use of our planetary resources and how we deploy them. We’re the ones spending our money on the life we think we want. We have purchasing power and with that power we make choices every day. Will we spend it on business-as-usual, or slightly-better-than-business-as-usual or can we be a lot bolder than that? I wonder, but our purchasing power, or withdrawing it, can influence companies to change the way they do business, whether in removing plastic packaging, or in making products that last longer and are repairable, and food that doesn’t destroy rain forests and reduce bio-diversity–basically, to buy less and better. Our voting power is critical too, of course, especially given that there is an upcoming election. The fact that the low-emissions zones in London are even contested at this point shows how unwilling we are to make meaningful change. Very few people I speak to have actually tried to weigh up their options and to make anything but the most minimal change, so I’m not sure why we think industries and governments are going to be any more willing to do so.
I’m also cynical about any good coming out of the Just Stop Oil antics. I just don’t see a clear link between their headline news and any indication of change, but I could really get behind consumer activism. How about a programme where people sign up to limit their carbon footprint to a specific number with AI helping them to help them realise their goals? If that happened at scale then we wouldn’t be dependent on COP with its vastly under-powered ambitions. We the people need to go a lot further and a lot faster to change the trajectory towards an increasingly likely (and untenable) 20C.