Scientists protest at UK Parliament 5 September 2023.
In response to the final agreement at the COP28 UN climate talks in Dubai, Romain Ioualalen, Global Policy Manager at Oil Change International, said:
“People power put a full, fast, fair, and funded fossil fuel phaseout at the top of the UN agenda. While we didn’t get there, we secured the first UN climate agreement that calls on all countries to ‘transition away from fossil fuels,’ sending an unprecedented signal to the fossil fuel industry that its days are numbered. This progress has only been achieved by decades of struggle by frontline communities, Indigenous Peoples, and the most affected countries.
“This agreement does not deliver the full, fast, fair, funded phaseout of fossil fuels that global communities urgently demand for a just energy transition. Rich countries must pay their fair share to enable the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy in the Global South.
“Disgracefully, the agreement is littered with loopholes, leaving escape hatches for the fossil fuel industry that could undermine the transition away from fossil fuels. This risks giving big polluters a free pass to continue extraction at a time when swift and coordinated action is desperately needed. This can only lead to climate and economic chaos.
“But this doesn’t take away from the fact that people power across the world has forced leaders to finally accept that we must move away from fossil fuels if we are to have a livable future. We will keep holding firm — at COP, in the streets, and wherever fossil fuels and the climate crisis threaten communities and the planet — until we have a full, fast, fair, funded, phaseout of all fossil fuels.“
Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer called for urgent action from the UK government to go beyond the compromise deal agreed at this year’s COP climate summit in Dubai.
Image of the Green Party’s Carla Denyer on BBC Question Time.
Denyer said:
“Without sustained government action following this disappointing COP28, the world is heading for a hellish future. We need to press our ambitions with a renewed vigour.
“The fact that UK climate change minister, Graham Stuart, returned to London to vote on the Rwanda Bill just as the hardest part of the negotiations got underway tells the world this Conservative government just doesn’t care.
“This is the price we pay for government chaos at home – being sidelined at the most crucial moment in the COP28 negotiations.
“COP agreed a ‘transition’ away from fossil fuels that falls far short of the fair phase out that is needed. It offers market solutions that will leave behind the poorest countries and bolster the Petro-states.
“Despite this disappointing result, we can still achieve an outcome that avoids the worst of the climate emergency while also creating safer streets, cleaner air, warmer homes, more jobs in renewable energy and support for our farmers to produce more food locally.
“There is a groundswell of calls for action from around the world – at least 127 countries called for or endorsed a decision to phase out fossil fuels at COP28. Now is the time for action.
“We got some limited cash pledges to kick-start the loss and damage fund, more warm words about the 1.5°C target and a desperate compromise on fossil-fuels that protects the interests of oil producers rather than the planet.
“We urged COP28 to achieve three vital things – the changes needed now to keep to the 1.5°C target set eight years ago in Paris; the phasing out of fossil fuels, and generous contributions to the loss and damage fund to support poorer countries through the climate crisis.
“The UK’s £60 million contribution to the loss and damage fund is not new money, and the totals pledged from the richest countries amount to less than 0.2% of the irreversible damage poorer countries are facing from global heating each year.
“Taken together, COP28 has not delivered nearly enough to tackle the climate crisis. That means it is all the more important to make our demand for action now clearer and louder.
“For instance, we must make the UK government face up to the science and cancel new oil and gas licences for the North Sea.
“It must now increase investment in onshore and offshore wind, and other forms of renewable energy, to deliver on pledges made.
“And the government must fund local councils to deliver a nationwide programme of home and business insulation to cut energy use and lower people’s bills.
“If the government here, and other world leaders, would engage seriously, we could be creating a much better and fairer future for people throughout the UK and around the world.
“We can still achieve that future. The best time to act was decades ago. The next best time is right now.”
The next few days could be the world’s last chance of keeping global heating within safe limits, nations meeting for the Cop28 UN climate summit have been told.
With talks in Dubai now entering their final phase, the world’s governments are still far apart on the central question of whether to phase out fossil fuels.
Dan Jørgensen, Denmark’s climate minister, who has been charged with one of the key roles in forging an agreement among deeply divided governments, said: “We cannot negotiate with nature. The climate cannot compromise. No well meaning words will change a single thing unless we act. This week may be our last opportunity to bring us on course to keeping 1.5C alive.”
Jørgensen, along with the South African minister Barbara Creecy, will chair negotiations on the global stocktake, a process under the 2015 Paris climate agreement that assesses progress – or the lack of it – towards meeting the treaty’s goals of holding global temperature rises “well below” 2C and “pursuing efforts” to keep them to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
It is well established that the world is far off track to stay within those limits, which scientists say are vital to staving off the worst impacts of the climate crisis. Average temperatures for this year are likely to break records and come close to the 1.5C threshold, and on current trends the world will hit 3C of heating, rendering swathes of the planet effectively uninhabitable.
For those reasons, the global stocktake will also contain recommendations to governments for a “course correction”, asking them to change policies and bring in measures that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions drastically. The latest draft was published on Friday, and is currently being examined, but there are likely to be more iterations of it before the end of the talks.
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Romain Ioualalen, global policy manager at Oil Change International, a pressure group, said: “It shows unprecedented momentum for an agreement on phasing out all fossil fuels, owing to the relentless pressure from people and governments that are aligned with the science. The Cop president emphasised again today that 1.5C is his north star – and he must deliver on that promise with a Cop decision to build a fast, fair, full and financed fossil fuel phase-out rooted in equity, and enabled by governments redirecting trillions in finance from fossil fuel industry handouts to the real solution: renewable energy and energy efficiency.”
As well as phasing down fossil fuels, countries are being asked to triple global renewable energy generation and to double energy efficiency. The former is already likely to be met, on current trends, and the latter should save money amid high fossil fuel prices and a cost of living crisis around the world.
Developing countries are also concerned that a target to double the amount of finance they get to help them adapt to the impacts of the climate crisis has also not been met. Stiell called for more progress on this issue. “I don’t want to see diversions and political tactics that hold climate adaptation hostage,” he warned.
Failure to agree a phase-out of fossil fuels at the UN Cop28 climate summit would push the world beyond the crucial 1.5C temperature limit and into climate breakdown, the UK’s former climate chief has warned.
Alok Sharma, who was president of the Cop26 summit in Glasgow, said it was vital that governments made a clear commitment in the next few days to eliminate coal, oil and gas.
“If you’re going to keep 1.5C alive, you’re going to have to have language on a phase-out of fossil fuels,” he told the Observer in an interview. “And you’re going to need to accompany that with a credible implementation plan.”
He urged governments to act. “We are running out of time. The window on 1.5C is closing fast, and unless we are willing to act now, with the urgency that this issue demands, we will lose that 1.5C,” he said. “We are literally in the last chance saloon to save our children’s future.”
More than 190 governments are meeting in Dubai for the final days of the Cop28 summit, which runs until Tuesday, with the question of whether to phase out fossil fuels at the top of the agenda. At least 100 countries are in favour of a phase-out, but some major fossil fuel producers – including Saudi Arabia, China and India – are opposed.
Sharma was credited with keeping 1.5C “alive” against the odds at the Glasgow summit he led in 2021, when he managed to forge a deal among more than 190 squabbling countries that focused on the goal of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
Greenpeace: COP28 must answer the call for a fossil fuel phase out
Dubai, UAE – As COP28 resumes for a second week, negotiators will be faced with answering the call for a commitment to a Fossil Fuel Phase Out in Dubai. Never before have we heard so many voices, coming from so many directions to seize the moment and commit to phasing out oil, coal and gas. And never before have alternative formulations on fossil fuel phase out made it this far into a draft text. But there are still no guarantees on a decision on fossil fuels, so all is in play.
Kaisa Kosonen, Head of the Greenpeace COP28 delegation said: “We are here to make fossil fuels history. By now governments know they can’t leave this summit without an agreement to end fossil fuels, in a fast and fair manner. Now the question is what is the package of solutions, support and cooperation that will get us over the finishing line. It’s clear that developed countries are the ones that need to take the lead here.
The solutions are ready – a fast and fair transition to renewable energy is possible – but it won’t happen fast enough unless we push the fossil fuel industry out of the way.
Business leader says government tax credit for oil and gas ‘extends the life of Canada’s largest industrial sector.’
The government of Alberta, home to the tar sands pictured here, has announced taxpayer funding in the range of $3.5 billion to $5.3 billion for CCS projects. Credit: (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
As world leaders meet in Dubai for the COP28 climate negotiations, federal and provincial governments in Canada are preparing to give an estimated $15.3 billion in new subsidies to oil and gas companies, and other heavy emitters, for expanding the production of fossil fuels, according to climate experts.
Those subsidies are taking the form of massive new tax credits for carbon capture and storage (CCS), which is a technology that companies use to grow their extraction of oil and gas while burying a fraction of their greenhouse gas emissions underground.
“I completely agree that Canada’s tax credit for carbon capture and storage is a subsidy to the oil and gas industry,” Jason MacLean, an adjunct professor who studies climate policy at the University of Saskatchewan, told DeSmog in an email.
The federal Canadian government is close to announcing details on a tax credit that will go to top oil and gas companies like Suncor, Cenovus, and Imperial Oil, along with other major industrial polluters. Policymakers previously estimated the value of these investment tax credits to be $10 billion. The government of Alberta, home to the tar sands, has meanwhile announced taxpayer funding in the range of $3.5 billion to $5.3 billion for CCS projects.
The Pathways Alliance, an industry lobbying and marketing group representing 95 percent of tar sands production, says these tax credits are essential for oil and gas producers to lower their emissions in line with achieving “net-zero emissions” by 2050. Reaching “net-zero” entails stabilizing global temperature rise at 1.5 degrees Celsius, a level beyond which scientists warn the impacts to humankind could be catastrophic.
Yet, in submissions to the federal government, the Pathways Alliance explained that lowering a portion of oil sands emissions via carbon capture will create opportunities for the industry to expand globally — even as other countries move away from fossil fuels. “We believe Canada should seek to increase its market share for responsibly produced, lower emissions energy, even if global market demand, as a whole, begins to decline,” the group said in one submission.
“We need to keep in mind that this is about reducing emissions and not reducing production,” the organization said last year in a separate submission, as revealed by DeSmog.
Representatives of the Pathways Alliance are among the 35 people with ties to the fossil fuel sector who are part of Canada’s official delegation to COP28 this year. At the climate talks, they are pushing for policies supporting global deployment of carbon capture, which will allow companies to keep producing oil as countries get stricter about regulating emissions.
“It is really important for the energy industry in Canada because it extends the life of Canada’s largest industrial sector and maintains our competitiveness over the long term,” Scott Crockatt of the Business Council of Alberta told the Calgary Herald last month.
However, tax credits supporting carbon capture risk accelerating already dangerous levels of global temperature rise, MacLean argues. Even if the technology can fully capture emissions from the production of oil and gas in Canada — which is an expensive and uncertain proposition — the vast majority of climate impacts occur when fossil fuels are burned in places like car and truck engines and house furnaces.
“No possible innovation or improvement to [carbon capture technology] can change the fact that it applies only to the direct and upstream greenhouse gas emissions arising from the production of oil and gas, not the downstream emissions resulting from the combustion of oil and gas, which represent approximately 85 percent of the total emissions,” MacLean told DeSmog.
Allowing oil and gas to expand while relying on carbon capture could result in the release of 86 billion additional tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide between 2020 and 2050, according to a new analysis from the organization Climate Analytics. This “86 billion tonne carbon bomb” could derail efforts to keep global warming from exceeding dangerous thresholds, the group argues.
The Canadian government earlier this year unveiled detailed plans to remove “inefficient” oil and gas subsidies, with Environment and Climate Minister Steven Guilbeault saying at the time that “the simple reality is that it’s no longer free to pollute in Canada.”
But climate campaigners say that promise risks being completely undermined by the new carbon capture tax credits.
According to the president of COP28, the latest round of UN climate negotiations in the United Arab Emirates, there is “no science” indicating that phasing out fossil fuels is necessary to restrict global heating to 1.5°C.
President Sultan Al Jaber is wrong. There is a wealth of scientific evidence demonstrating that a fossil fuel phase-out will be essential for reining in the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. I know because I have published some of it.
Back in 2021, just before the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, my colleagues and I published a paper in Nature entitled Unextractable fossil fuels in a 1.5°C world. It argued that 90% of the world’s coal and around 60% of its oil and gas needed to remain underground if humanity is to have any chance of meeting the Paris agreement’s temperature goals.
Crucially, our research also highlighted that the production of oil and gas needed to start declining immediately (from 2020), at around 3% each year until 2050.
This assessment was based on a clear understanding that the production and use of fossil fuels, as the primary cause of CO₂ emissions (90%), needs to be reduced in order to stop further heating. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that net zero CO₂ emissions will only be reached globally in the early 2050s, and warming stabilised at 1.5°C, if a shift away from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy sources begins immediately.
If global emissions and fossil fuel burning continue at their current rates, this warming level will be breached by 2030.
Since the publication of our Nature paper, scientists have modelled hundreds of scenarios to explore the world’s options for limiting warming to 1.5°C. Many feature in the latest report by the IPCC. Here is what they tell us about the necessary scale of a fossil fuel phase-out.
Fossil fuel use must fall fast
A recent paper led by atmospheric scientist Ploy Achakulwisut took a detailed look at existing scenarios for limiting warming to 1.5°C. For pathways consistent with 1.5°C, coal, oil and gas supply must decline by 95%, 62% and 42% respectively, between 2020 and 2050.
However, many of these pathways assume rates of carbon capture and storage and carbon dioxide removal that are likely to be greater than what could be feasibly achieved. Filtering out these scenarios shows that gas actually needs to be eliminated twice as fast, declining by 84% in 2050 relative to 2020 levels. Coal and oil would also see larger declines: 99% and 70% respectively.
In fact, oil and gas may need to be eliminated even quicker than that. A study by energy economist Greg Muttitt showed that many of the pathways used in the most recent IPCC report assume coal can be phased out in developing countries faster than is realistic, considering the speed of history’s most rapid energy transitions. A more feasible scenario would oblige developed countries in particular to get off oil and gas faster.
A fair and orderly transition
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has added to evidence in favour of phasing out fossil fuels by concluding that there is no need to license and exploit new oil and gas fields, first in a 2021 report and again this year.
This latest IEA analysis also estimates that existing oil and gas fields would need to wind down their production by 2.5% a year on average to 2030, accelerating to 5% a year from 2030 (and 7.5% for gas between 2030-40).
A separate analysis of the IPCC’s scenarios for holding global warming at 1.5°C came to the same conclusion. Since no new fields need to be brought into development, global production of oil and gas should be falling.
This message was reinforced by the UN’s recent production gap report, which concluded that producer countries including the United Arab Emirates need to be moving towards a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, not expanding production. Instead, the report estimated that in CO₂ terms, planned fossil fuel production in 2030 is projected to be 110% higher than the required phase-out trajectory to meet 1.5°C.
The evidence for a fossil fuel phase-out is clear. The debate should now turn to executing it.
A fair and orderly transition from fossil fuels must acknowledge the differing capacity of countries: developing countries are more economically dependent on fossil fuels and have less money to switch to cleaner technologies. Some investment in oil and gas will be needed for existing infrastructure. This would maintain the minimum level of production necessary for a carefully managed transition. Overall though, fossil fuels should now be in rapid decline.
Rich countries need to phase out fossil fuels now and raise the funding to help developing countries make the transition.
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