After reeling from the hottest year ever recorded, world leaders convening for this year’s U.N. climate talks, or COP28, have for the first time called for a “transition away” from the fossil fuels that are fueling the extreme weather that has torched, drenched, and parched countries around the globe.
After reeling from the hottest year ever recorded, world leaders convening for this year’s U.N. climate talks, or COP28, have for the first time called for a “transition away” from the fossil fuels that are fueling the extreme weather that has torched, drenched, and parched countries around the globe.
The language, while nonbinding, offers an important signal about the role that the world’s dirtiest energy sources—coal, oil, and natural gas—have to play in the future global economy, following fierce clashes between wealthy petrostates and other countries that had pushed for stronger commitments to phase those fuels out.
After a draft text released on Monday was widely slammed for its weak fossil fuel language, contentious negotiations continued, pushing talks way past their Tuesday deadline. Ultimately, negotiators in Dubai settled on a final agreement that urges nations to instead transition away from fossil fuels in a “just, orderly and equitable manner”; curb methane emissions; and triple renewable energy capacity in the next seven years. The deal also directs hundreds of millions of dollars into a loss and damage fund for vulnerable nations.
“It is a success that they were not able to completely weaken it—they were not able to completely remove the language about transitioning away from fossil fuels,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “And yet, it’s this clear indication that the petrostates are not going to go gently into the night.”
The question of fossil fuels has long been a touchy topic at U.N. climate talks; 2021 marked the first time that fossil fuels were even explicitly referenced in an agreement at one of the periodic summits among the Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
But as the threats of climate change become increasingly pronounced, the efforts by big oil producers to water down fossil fuel commitments have sparked growing outrage, especially among nations on the front lines of the climate crisis. The lead negotiator representing 39 vulnerable island nations at this year’s conference said that the final agreement was inked when they were not present—robbing them of the ability to push back against the provisions.
Still, the pact was celebrated by many negotiators, who stressed that it was just the start of a broader shift. Under the final agreement, countries should accelerate their transition away from fossil fuels this decade, with the aim of reaching net zero emissions by 2050. “Humanity has finally done what is long, long, long overdue,” declared Wopke Hoekstra, the European Union commissioner for climate action, who also made note of the “30 years we’ve spent to arrive at the beginning of the end of fossil fuels.”
To slow the climate crisis, dozens of developed countries committed to legally binding targets to slash their greenhouse gas emissions under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol; later, 196 parties ramped up their legal obligations with the 2015 Paris Agreement. But in the years since, nobody has stayed on track—and the world will likely hurtle past a critical warming threshold by 2035, according to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
Unlike the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, COP pledges are not binding, with no enforcement mechanisms to hold countries to their commitments. But experts say that they send an important message to other leaders, companies, and local communities about the future of fossil fuels, trickling down to shape behavior and action. “I do think it sets the tone of the conversation moving forward,” Swain said.
“What you hope to see at a COP is at least a statement—an agreement of ambition,” said Susan Joy Hassol, a contributing author of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, on Tuesday. “I think it’s important for the world to send that signal when they get together, that this is our intention, you know, we know that we’ve got some big gaps.”
It’s not just the major oil producing countries that balked at the notion of phasing out fossil fuels. China, India, and other countries still climbing the energy ladder in Africa and South America have all pushed back against the language, saying that they need the funds from their fossil fuel production in order to grow their economies and cannot act on the same timeline.
From the beginning, this year’s U.N. climate talks were blanketed in both controversy and smog. Before the conference kicked off, Dubai faced criticism after the BBC reported that Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber—both the president of COP28 and the head of the United Arab Emirates’ state oil company—wanted to use the conference to strike new oil deals. He later came under fire, yet again, for claiming that there was “no science” backing the notion that phasing out fossil fuels is required to stay below the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above preindustrial levels, although he later said that his comments had been misrepresented.
Among the roughly 70,000 people who converged in Dubai, this year’s COP conference also witnessed a record number of lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry and those representing industrial agriculture. Compared to COP27, nearly four times more fossil fuel lobbyists attended this year’s conference, according to the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition—a sharp increase that has further intensified scrutiny of this year’s deliberations and the role of fossil fuel interests in global climate negotiations.
Facing the potential loss of their homes, island nations were particularly vocal throughout COP28 in advocating for stronger commitments to cutting fossil fuels and shaping negotiations. Despite being responsible for a disproportionately small fraction of greenhouse gas emissions, low-lying states such as the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, and Kiribati are especially vulnerable to rising sea levels.
“The Republic of the Marshall Islands did not come here to sign our death warrant,” John Silk, the minister of natural resources for the Marshall Islands, said on Monday in response to the draft text that omitted language on phasing out fossil fuels. “We will not go silently to our watery graves.”
“You see the anger in the comments from the island nation states. It’s their literal existence that’s at stake,” said Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and senior fellow at the Pacific Institute, on Tuesday.
Still, there were some bright spots, including boosted climate funding for food and agriculture and growing momentum for a fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty. By 2030, the agreement says, countries should aim to triple their renewable energy capacity and double the rate that they improve energy efficiency. More than 20 nations also vowed to accelerate their development of nuclear power by tripling their capacity by 2050, although experts warn that many hurdles loom.
In one of the biggest breakthroughs, negotiators approved a loss and damage fund that would help vulnerable nations grapple with climate-related losses after a three-decade-long push—although future financing remains an open question. So far, countries have, in total, pledged $700 million to the fund, which amounts to just 0.2 percent of the economic losses that vulnerable countries are estimated to be facing per year.
“Getting those first contributions, they are still obviously a tiny fraction of what’s needed,” Hassol said. “But that was one small and important victory.”
And without binding pledges, what will matter in the long run is how countries follow through in weaning themselves off of the fossil fuels that are leading to rising temperatures, including the single biggest contributor to the emissions: carbon dioxide. While countries clashed over their commitments at COP28, global carbon dioxide emissions from coal, oil, and natural gas production are projected to soar to a record high in 2023, according to a report by the Global Carbon Budget.
“Ultimately, the atmosphere doesn’t really care about these negotiations. They don’t directly affect global warming,” Swain said. “They only affect its trajectory if it actually translates to real action.”
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