The best the UN’s climate conference can do is set the floor for the world’s future a notch higher than before.
This morning in Dubai, after a long night of consultations, the world struck a deal that will guide countries’ commitments to fixing climate change. For the first time in the nearly 30 years of the Conference of Parties, a COP document managed to directly address reducing fossil fuels. The text “calls on parties” to transition “away from fossil fuels in energy systems.”
The deal still leaves significant allowances for fossil fuels to linger into the future, and includes language recognizing the utility of “transitional fuels,” which is code for natural gas, and “abatement,” which is code for carbon capture and storage, widely considered too expensive and unproven to be a meaningful solution. Still, it manages, however subtly, to “loosen the industry’s grip” on COP’s outcome, former Vice President Al Gore, who had railed against an earlier version of the text, said in a statement. After bringing down the gavel, Sultan Al Jaber, the head of the United Arab Emirates’ national oil company and the COP president, congratulated the countries on a job well done, christening the new document the “UAE Consensus.” Now the oil-rich country will forever have its name on a major climate deal, fated to be repeated over and over in diplomatic spaces for years to come.
After Al Jaber finished his speech, Samoa’s Anne Rasmussen, a lead negotiator for a group of 39 small island states that form a powerful bloc at COPs, took the floor. “We are a little confused about what just happened,” she said. COP is supposed to end in consensus, but Al Jaber had finalized the text before the representative of the island bloc, which had been most critical of the text being passed, even arrived. These small island states have repeatedly said that their countries risk uninhabitability beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. In their view, the agreement is missing strong timelines for peaking emissions and has a “litany of loopholes” for fossil fuels; it will lead to only incremental shifts even though they need transformational change. “We’re crossing oceans and getting drops of ambition,” Drue Toshiko Slatter, of Fiji, told me the morning the final text was released.
Every year, some version of this disappointment plays out. Over and over, COP produces texts that, however much they are trumpeted, fail to match the urgency or scope of the climate crisis. Without 2015’s Paris Agreement, the last notable COP result, the world would be in a much worse position, and still, eight years later, the most ambitious actions that the deal prompted leave the world far short of its goal of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius.
And yet, the agreements that emerge from this strange process have substantial sway. They may not be legally binding, but countries do, haltingly, move in the direction that they point. This COP will nudge the world toward pumping and buying less oil “this decade”—doing anything less would now be archaic. Ultimately, the COP process is not the expression of the world’s maximum ambition on climate change. It’s simply the new floor.
COP is riddled with mismatches between rhetoric and reality. At its pavilion, Saudi Arabia displayed a wall of plants with lit-up block letters spelling out KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA embedded in the foliage, while, along with a few other countries, threatening to block any text that included a phasedown of fuels. About once a day in the United Nations–administered Blue Zone, activists staged a meticulously planned and rehearsed protest. At the first one I happened upon, a man with a bullhorn said, “Okay, now the action is going to start, if the people in the front could sit so the people in the back could see.” The U.S. pledged $17.5 million for the newly established loss-and-damage fund but declined to join a coalition to end fossil-fuel subsidies.
Along with the UAE, the European Union, and plenty of others, the United States also celebrated the fossil-fuel language that did make it into the final agreement. An earlier version of the text, which had no language on fossil fuels at all, had sent delegations into disbelief and tearful deflation: “We will not sign our death certificate,” Toeolesulusulu Cedric Schuster, Samoa’s minister for natural resources and the environment, said to reporters on Monday. But the U.S. plans to drill for ever more oil and gas; this year is expected to break records in terms of domestic production. President Joe Biden recently approved the $8 billion Willow Project, which will drill oil from a pristine Alaskan ecosystem for decades to come.
For all these shortcomings, COP is the only system we’ve got to work out these knots. The obstructionist theatrics of a few OPEC countries in Dubai revived the same debate that seems to resurface at COP every year: Should this really all be done by consensus? Majority rule might have gotten the words phaseout of fossil fuels into the final text. But calling for “transitioning away” from the fuels is hardly a meaningful difference. In that respect, multilateralism worked, and under majority rule, states such as Samoa and Antigua and Barbuda might never be the moral forces they are in the process now. Larger powers have to listen to them and work to earn some trust, because they can single-handedly hold up the entire process. (Or not, if the gavel comes down before they’re in the room.) Of course, that means Saudi Arabia can hold deals hostage too.
Spending two weeks at COP did feel like entering another dimension. Day after day in Dubai, we returned to the sprawling, futuristic campus, our world conducted in boxlike buildings housing the country pavilions and carpeted plenary rooms, all set around a glowing geodesic dome. Some decorative foliage was real; some was fake. It was like being trapped on the set of Pleasantville, if Pleasantville had an air-quality index of 157 and more overt surveillance technology. But people who might otherwise never have a chance to confront one another were all in the same place. I spent some time with Gloria Ushigua, an Indigenous leader from the Sápara community in the Ecuadorian Amazon, who has resisted attempts to drill for oil in her territory. We visited the OPEC pavilion—it shared a building with the Indigenous pavilion. Ushigua was partly in traditional dress and was wearing a free hat she had gotten from a nuclear-energy group parked nearby. She had used red and black Sharpies on the hat to black out the word NUCLEAR with a geometric Amazonian design. The person at the OPEC booth suggested that the Indigenous group must use their oil; it will get them things they need, like glasses, which are made of plastic, a petroleum product.
This argument is one I heard again and again from fossil-fuel representatives: that we still need oil and gas. And the final agreement does reflect this idea; it specifies that the world move away from fossil fuels in energy systems alone. The gathered countries pledged to triple renewable-energy capacity and double the rate of efficiency improvements in energy systems, which, if actually done, will get us a good part of the way to the Paris Agreement targets of halting warming “well below” 2 degrees. But for the islands and other developing countries, the near-total lack of substantive language on climate finance in today’s final agreement hobbles their chances of phasing out their own fossil fuels. “It’s easier to get investment for a $100 million [liquid-natural-gas] plant than for a $20 million solar project,” a delegate from Antigua and Barbuda said on the plenary floor. Countries stuck in debt must still exploit their oil reserves to make payments. And, of course, oil burned anywhere adds up to more warming everywhere. The financial part of this picture will no doubt loom large over the next COP, to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, which is notably also a petrostate, with two-thirds of its government revenue tied to the fossil-fuel sector.
At one point, on the way to one of Dubai’s man-made palm-shaped islands, I passed a building that looked almost exactly like the Chrysler Building, in New York, then a second, identical quasi–Chrysler Building right beside it. I started thinking about what Dubai’s soaring skyscrapers would look like if we never stopped burning oil, and the UAE became too hot to live in. The sand dunes would eventually take back the 10-story parking garages attached to each of their bases, but they could never make it 80 floors up, the height of many buildings here, and certainly not to the top of the Burj Khalifa, which is some 80 floors higher than that. These would be here, likely forever, like the pyramids and ziggurats, poking out of the desert.
Then again, would Dubai ever be too hot to live in? Most Emiratis already spend all summer indoors, in constant air-conditioning—if we continue to burn oil, Emiratis would likely stay very oil rich, and could pay to live sealed in cooled buildings. Roads would have to go underground, sure. But you can live indefinitely in the desert if you have enough money. Maybe Dubai would be the last city on Earth.
Yet conference-goers did see the UAE pledge $100 million to the “loss-and-damage fund” and push in speeches, over and over, for keeping a science-based commitment to 1.5 degrees. Despite its shortcomings, COP28 signaled clearly that the fossil-fuel age is, starting now, slowly coming to an end. All told, humanity’s experiment with oil may not last that long. Hydrocarbons have defined our energy culture for several generations; will it change fast enough to save the next few? Right now that still depends on where people live. But the floor has been raised.
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