By George Moffatt • Jersey Shore Group
The cliché “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” didn’t apply last December to the United Nations’ COP28 climate conference, where the “horse” was obviously missing some teeth.
After days of wrangling, the conferees called for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” Any good lawyer would have a field day exposing the low level of commitment there.
But considering how the odds initially were stacked against COP28, even the half-step of “transitioning” is an achievement. After all, one of the world’s largest oil and gas exporters, the United Arab Emirates, was the conference host (Dubai), and Sultan Al Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, was president of the conference.
Fossil fuel producers, including Saudi Arabia, have pushed carbon capture and storage, which would protect fossil fuel industry profits and leave the cleanup–trapping and burying polluting CO2 emissions–to their customers. However, the scientific opinion is that carbon capture is not going to make much of a dent in CO2 emissions, and COP28 discounted the value of relying on that technology for solving the global warming problem.
Conference participants pledged to “ratchet up” climate action to keep the 1.5° C ceiling on global warming within reach. “Whilst we didn’t turn the page on the fossil fuel era in Dubai, this outcome is the beginning of the end,” said UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell. “Now all governments and businesses need to turn these pledges into real-economy outcomes, without delay.”
Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous, carefully noting COP28’s resolution to “transition” away from fossil fuels, said even a little progress in the face of such pressure from the oil industry was a step in the right direction. “At a COP hosted by a petro-state, presided over by a literal oil executive, with fossil fuel billionaires and their lobbyists crowding the halls in record numbers, the world still charted a way forward,” he said.
He described the final COP28 report as “a meaningful result of countless hours of global advocacy by Sierra Club and our partners across the world. Together, we not only forced global leaders to act, we fought back against the historic levels of influence—influence finally brought out of the shadows—that corporate polluters have had on negotiations.”
He also urged the Biden Administration to “lead a clear path forward for the rest of the world by stopping the expansion of the fossil fuel industry,” including “the expansion of LNG exports, pipelines, and drilling on our public lands and waters.
“As the global leader in oil production and the largest historical emitter of carbon pollution, the United States can and must lead the world forward in transitioning off of fossil fuels and onto clean energy once and for all.”
Al Jaber unsettled the COP28 mood when a video surfaced of him stating just weeks prior to the conference that, “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5° C.”
Fortunately, U.S. delegate and former Vice President Al Gore was having none of this. Criticizing Al Jaber sharply in an e-mail, he wrote, “From the moment this absurd masquerade began, it was only a matter of time before his preposterous disguise no longer concealed the reality of the most brazen conflict of interest in the history of climate negotiations.”
Gore, producer of the eye-opening documentary An Inconvenient Truth and founder of The Climate Reality Project, added, “Obviously, the world needs to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible.” He alleged that Al Jaber “has been preparing one of the most aggressive expansions of fossil fuel production, timed to begin as soon as he bangs the final gavel to conclude COP28.”
Perhaps because of the uproar from environmentalists, Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, announced a $250 billion fund that, by 2030, is “specifically designed to bridge the climate finance gap” and stimulate further investment. The funds, he explained, will come from oil revenues. And Ajay Banga, president of the World Bank, which has been criticized for not doing enough to fight climate change, announced a number of organizational changes to address the issues.
Hopefully, the fossil fuel industries’ fixations on profits over people will wane as wind turbine farms expand worldwide, people switch to electric vehicles, and the use of solar panels above ground and heat pumps below keeps expanding.
Of course, our fossil-fuel dependent utilities must continue to convert to clean electricity. In 2022, U.S. electrical utilities generated about 4,243 billion kilowatt hours (kWh), with about 60% of this produced by fossil fuels.
Unless we build on the resolution from COP28 and transition away from fossil fuels, we eventually may hear the dinosaurs snickering, “We told you so.”