Deal! Or No Deal?

An 11th-hour deal has been struck at the CoP28 climate talks — but what kind of deal? The devil’s in the details, as always.

It’s being labelled “the UAE consensus,” but those are not the kind of words to stir hope and joy in the climate science community.

On the face of it, the 11th hour — literally, midnight Pacific Time — agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels sounds like, if not the end result exactly, a step in the right direction.

What the EU has labelled “the beginning of the end of fossil fuels” is also being singled out by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) as an “improvement,” but with a “litany of loopholes.”

Climate justice campaigners are, by and large, disappointed with the wording, which they say can — and probably will — stand in the way of implementation.

Was it ever thus.

The reaction from small island countries like Tuvalu, Vanuatu and Kiribati is telling because they are the nation states most vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis in the immediate term, as opposed to “somewhere in the future,” say, 2050, when — in theory — the world will have cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to limit global heating to no more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

That was already a tall order as the science tells us that the world is already at 1.7°C ahead of pre-industrial levels. Rapid ice melt in the polar regions and glaciers in more temperate climes might not seem evident right now in London, New York and Washington D.C., but it is an existential issue in Tonga, Micronesia and the Maldives, among 33 other member states.

The deal encourages the world’s nations to embark on a de facto phasing out of fossil fuels, but developing countries still need billions of dollars to help them transition away from coal, oil and gas. The G7 nations, fast-growing economies like those in China and India, and the wealthy oil sheikhdoms of the Arabian Gulf are not compelled, let alone required, to move as quickly as the climate science urges. The US has pledged just $20 million in new finance to help emerging nations, and even that amount — paltry considering the US is also the world’s most active producer of oil and gas — and even that is likely to be rolled back when political conservatives regain power in the US White House and Congress, as they are likely to do next November, with Canada to follow in 2025.

China has already vowed to expand coal production, and India will face no penalty for following suit. Russia, which worked hard behind the scenes to forestall any kind of deal, including this one, will face little opposition next year, when the UN’s climate conference will be held in Azerbaijan, an oil producer and more or less a client state of the oil and gas-producing Putinocracy.

There is a silver lining to all this, if silver is the right word exactly. Timing, as always, is a factor. Perhaps shamed by the optics of handing the world’s biggest, most important climate conference to Azerbaijan in 2024, the following year’s conference will be held in Brazil. And not just Brazil, but in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, the symbol of nature’s last stand against global heating.

Let’s hope it’s still there.

Climate Talks Stall

An ancient sea monster’s massive skull has been found in seaside cliffs in Britain, stunning palaeontologists — an appropriate metaphor as any for the impasse at the CoP28 climate talks.

EPA

A stunning 6-foot-long skull of a 150 million-year-old carnivorous marine reptile has been chiselled out from a cliff along southern England’s Jurassic Coast in what scientists are calling a one-of-a-kind find. The pliosaur skull was discovered after pieces of it started to fall from an English cliff onto a beach. The skull, unique because it’s complete, unusual fossils of its kind, was extracted from the cliff in Dorset this past weekend using ropes and a makeshift stretcher.

This is a timely — and appropriate! — metaphor for the UN climate talks in Dubai, which were supposed to end today in a ceremony of back-slapping and mutual celebration but which are instead mired in hostility and acrimony. This is what the UN gets for staging a conversation about phasing out fossil fuels — a primary driver of global heating — in an oil sheikdom on the Arabian peninsular, where Big Oil is not just a way of doing business: It’s practically a religion.

And so it goes.

First the facts, as of 11:34 GMT.

  • More countries have expressed anger over the leaked draft text of the CoP28 final agreement. It says nothing, promises nothing, and delivers nothing. It is, however, very long, which has slowed down the process of reading between the lines to find something — anything — worth talking about. So far, the paralysis of analysis has drifted beyond 48 hours.

• The UK’s climate minister — an oxymoron if ever there was one — has left the climate conference, not so much in a ceremonial parade of celebration as sneaking out in the middle of the night, metaphorically speaking, hoping that no one would notice. They have. “(Climate minister) Graham Stuart flying home in the middle of critical negotiations tells you everything you need to know about this Conservative government,” Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown’s climate change minister at Copenhagen in 2009 and a regular at climate summits ever since, told reporters. “They are weak, divided and chaotic … They can’t stand up and fight for lower energy bills for the British people, can’t stand up and fight for investment into our country, and they can’t stand up and fight to provide climate leadership.” Other than that, though, they’re great.

  • Climate campaigners warned that details of the historic loss-and-damage agreement from the first day of the summit are still lacking — nearly two weeks later. Oh, well, what’s the hurry? It’s not as if the climate crisis is, well, a crisis.

Indigenous groups and climate activists from the global south have once again called out the hypocrisy of “rich nations” over their demand that fossil fuels be phased out globally — while increasing production at home.

Where’s Kurt Vonnegut when you need him?

The talks continue — if, strictly speaking, they can no longer be called talks anymore .

Science Photo Library

And the Winner Is … Azerbaijan

United Nations policy of sharing climate conferences among the world’s regions means next year’s meeting will be held in another petrostate. Politics trumps climate policy — again.

Saturday’s “Global Day of Action,” in which climate campaigners from around the world staged demonstrations at an already fractious CoP28 meeting in the UAE, produced yet another disconnect. Next year’s climate conference — or what’s left of climate anyway — will be hosted by the unitary semi-presidential Republic of Azerbaijan, a petrostate rich in oil and gas with many, many pipelines.

So much for the idea of rolling back the world’s reliance on emissions-causing fossil fuels, let alone phasing fossil fuels out entirely.

The Southern Gas Corridor connects Azerbaijan’s vast Shah Deniz gas field to continental Europe, reducing the EU’s dependence on Russian gas — making it one of the most active regions in the world for oil exploration and development. Hoopla!

If you’re wondering how a petrostate ended up hosting the UN’s most high-profile conference on the environment — for the second year in a row — blame war.

UN policy means that 2024 is Eastern Europe’s turn to take over the rotating presidency. The decision has to be unanimous. In theory, that’s good policy for a global organization that claims to represent every region of the world, though in practice it often results in decisions that satisfy no one. Russia vetoed EU countries from hosting — don’t cry for me, Ukraine — and Armenia initially blocked Azerbaijan’s bid. Azerbaijan seized the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in September after more than 30 years of simmering tensions, forcing some 120,000 ethnic Armenians to flee their homes in what Foreign Policy magazine called “one of the starkest examples of forced displacement in the 21st century.” This was about four weeks before the conflagration in Gaza, and follows on the heels of Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine, which has stalled in the bloodiest stalemated conflict in Europe since the Second World War.

Late last week, in a desperate bid to forge a peace deal, Armenia — hopelessly overmatched militarily against Azerbaijan — withdrew its own bid to host CoP29 and agreed to support its tormentor. Money talks. The reality is that few countries in Eastern Europe are able to stump up the finances and facilities needed to host such a large conference, and Russia’s threatened veto against EU countries ruled out benign candidates like the democratic republic of Slovenia — it’s governed by a democratically elected prime minister as the head of government and a democratically elected president as head of state!

Never mind that, by most accounts, Slovenia — a mostly mountainous and forested country bordered by Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the northeast, Croatia to the south and the Adriatic Sea to the southwest — would have made an ideal host for a global climate conference.

What the hell had this got to do with the climate crisis, you might well ask. Welcome to realpolitik in the 21st century.

“Choosing Azerbaijan as a host will do little to quell protests from climate (campaigners) that (global climate conferences) have been … captured by fossil fuel interests,” The Guardian reported Saturday. “Much like this year’s host, the country of 10 million people on the border of Eastern Europe and Western Asia relies heavily on digging up fuels that heat the planet when burned.

“Oil and gas production accounted for nearly half of the country’s GDP and over 92.5% of its export revenue last year, according to the US government’s International Trade Administration.”

Alrighty then!

Business as usual, in other words.

EPA

”Down” or “Out”

Wording is a key battleground at the CoP28 climate conference in Dubai, with stakeholders digging in over whether fossil fuels be dialed down or phased out completely. It was ever thus.

Geralt/Pixabay

Word soup is the order of the day midway through the climate-change summit in the UAE, as stakeholders appear divided between those who want to limit fossil-fuel cuts to “unabated” oil and gas and those who want to include all fossil fuels in any agreement, whether they’re abated, unabated or both.

Other disputes are developing over whether to tie the growth of renewable energy to any proposed deal, digging in over whether any changes in policy be implemented “gradually” or “rapidly” over a specified period of time, be it “this decade,” “next decade,” “mid-century” (2050) or “by the end of the century.” Or not at all. “It won’t affect us personally or directly — let someone else deal with it.”

“Unabated” refers to the burning of fossil fuels where carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions are released directly into the atmosphere, which exacerbates global heating, which most delegates — though not all — now admit is a genuine crisis.

“Abated,” on the other hand, means  — well, no one appears quite sure what it means. Loosely defined, “abated” refers to the burning of coal, oil and gas coupled with the capture and storage, permanent or semi-permanent, of the resulting greenhouse gases. “Carbon capture,” in other words.

Bottom line: There is no agreed-on definition of what “abated” really means. It’s just something to argue about. And if climate conferences have proved one thing in recent times, it’s that people like to argue.

It doesn’t matter how much carbon dioxide is stored, the optimists say, just so long as some is. Regardless of whether countries agree to “phase down” or “phase out” fossil fuels, the production and use of fossil fuels will “drop dramatically.”

It’s already too late, climate realists say: This is no time for semantics.

Aren’t you glad you asked?

Some facts are unassailable — except, of course, to those who choose to dispute them.

Fossil fuels are the single largest contributor to present-day global heating and are responsible for most of the cumulative historical emissions.

Furthermore, continued expansion of oil and gas development will “lock in” future emissions, according to scientists who have testified before the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Their findings represent a “large consensus” of scientific opinion, according to published reports; further development of oil and gas fields — as has been decided by several countries already — is “incompatible” with keeping temperatures below the 1.5°C threshold agreed to at the 2015 Paris summit.

“Large consensus” or no, the experts are divided — if one looks hard enough.

Dr. Alaa Al Khourdajie, a respected climate scientist and research fellow at Imperial College London, has said these disagreements emphasize the need to be “transparent” and “crystal clear” about what abated fossil fuel really means, in the same way a “clear” and “obvious” error by a match official at a Premier League soccer match be overturned by instant video replay (though, in practice, that hasn’t worked as expected).

So far, it’s about as clear as mud.

“There is a lack of clarity about what counts as unabated and what counts as abated,” Dr. Khourdajie told Carbon Brief,  a UK-based website that specializes in the science and policy of climate change. “Largely due to the absence of agreed definitions in the underlying literature at the time of (these) negotiations.”

Again, aren’t you glad you asked?

The CoP28 climate conference concludes this weekend.