The 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP28, was held this year in Dubai, between 30 November and 13 December. Holding a summit to address the climate crisis in the largest megacity of an Arabian Gulf petrostate to me is a bit like having your Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a whisky distillery, and this summit did indeed throng with the fossil fuel lobby, desperately trying to frustrate the process of saving the world in the name of profit. Maybe they thought, as this summit was held in the UAE, that the ears of world leaders and climate envoys would be easy to pour their poison into, but, against my expectations, this did not happen.
Despite my reservations that Dubai would be a wholly inappropriate backdrop for this summit, the agreement reached at the end of proceedings was a more progressive one tan cynics may have expected. Hailed as “the beginning of the end” for the fossil fuel era by the UN’s Climate chief Simon Stiell, this was indeed a more positive conclusion to this year’s COP than previous years. However, the agreement still fell markedly short of what needs to be achieved for climate change to be successfully curtailed.
The deal calls on all nations to move away from the use of fossil fuels, the first time all fossil fuels, including natural gas, have been referenced in a COP agreement and acknowledged as the driving force behind climate change. When put in this context, it is difficult not to be depressed that it has taken humanity 28 years to officially recognise all fossil fuels as the cause of climate change. It’s something we’ve all known for decades, something the aforementioned moustache-twirling, money-grubbing, Disney villain-esque fossil fuel lobby has expended a ridiculous amount of energy to prevent. However, this text is on paper. Coal, oil, gas, all named and shamed, however unacceptably overdue.
Conspicuously absent from the text are the words “phase out” in respect of fossil fuels, or even the words “phase down”, as was included in previous COP deals, instead signalling the need to “move away”. “Phase out” is important to many nations in attendance, most notably to Small Island Developing States (SIDS), many of whom face the threat of literal extinction if sea levels continue to rise at their current rate. Indeed, many SIDS were not even in the room when the deal was agreed to and proceedings came to an end.
This deal, whilst a step in the right direction towards collective net zero goals, does not come close to fully addressing the problem. The nations of the world have come together at COP28 to recognise the source of the problem, but there was a widespread acceptance that more, much more is needed before light can be seen through the smoke. Next year’s COP will need to be even more progressive, commit to a proper phaseout, or at the very least a phase-down. Instead, a commitment to triple energy output from renewable sources and double energy efficiency, a clear signal that the governments of the world will facilitate the transition away from fossil fuels and towards green energy, especially sources such as solar and wind power. A promise to remove harmful and counter-productive subsidies on fossil fuels, making the production of energy via unclean means harder and more expensive, whilst making production via renewable sources cheaper and more efficient. The Loss and Damage Fund established last year was operationalised in Dubai, with funding commitments agreed upon.
The real driver behind a more progressive future COP deal, as it was now in Dubai, is business and private enterprise. As dirty a truth as it may be, without the backing of investors and the potential for the generation of profit, net zero will fail. That being said, the lack of foresight shown by private enterprise in this regard has been the ball and chain around net zero’s ankle for the entire journey so far, and until it is accepted that money will be lost as a result of our efforts to save the world, we will continue to fail.
In reality, what is needed is radical action. A commitment to phaseout fossil fuels, for me is the bare minimum. COP28’s deal was disappointing in that this was not agreed to. There is not going to be a way to keep to globally agreed climate targets and maintain the economic status quo. Deals like this are not enough, and will never be enough, until a future text includes the words “immediate end” to the use of fossil fuels.
The world will experience more broken records for temperature rises this year. More natural environments will be irreversibly destroyed, more species will go extinct, more money will be made off the back of these crimes against the earth, driven entirely by the pursuit of profit.
I again affirm my belief that profit reductions and economic slowdowns for private enterprise are not as serious a consequence as the worst outcomes of the climate crisis. Job losses and bankruptcies are not existential threats in the way that ongoing environmental destruction is. Trying to avoid these economic inevitabilities is futile. Money makes the world go ’round, it’s true. But so do our natural environments, the crops that produce our food and the nutrition-rich land which grows them, the plants which pump oxygen into our atmosphere, the seas which sustain all life on the planet. Profit is a desirable outcome of all ventures, including the venture to decarbonise our energy infrastructure. But there is no profit on a dead planet.
stay safe
/e