It’s well past midnight in Dubai, and negotiations are still ongoing on the last day of the United Nations climate summit, known as COP28.
Representatives from more than 170 countries are working overtime to hash out a unanimous agreement that charts a course forward after the hottest year on record.
We don’t yet know what’s in the final text, and you’ll receive a special edition of the newsletter when it arrives. But it’s clear that nations around the world remain deeply divided over the future of fossil fuels, even after two weeks of talks that promised to bring more stakeholders to the negotiating table.
Many countries, including vulnerable island states and some prosperous European countries, are calling for a rapid phaseout of coal, oil and natural gas.
But many major fossil fuel-producing companies and countries — including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which is hosting COP28 — don’t want to give up the golden goose. Some developing countries are also opposed to an across-the-board phaseout, believing it will limit their economic growth.
“To tell us to stop fossil fuels is an insult. It’s like you are telling Uganda to stay in poverty,” Ruth Nankabirwa, Uganda’s minister of energy and mineral development, said on X. She added that Uganda was open to “a long-term phase out” but only if “developing nations can exploit their resources in the near term, while wealthy longtime producers quit first.”
The U.A.E. was hoping for a breakthrough COP28 deal that left all parties satisfied. That was always going to be a stretch.
An early draft this weekend was seen as watering down calls for a phaseout. It said nations “could” take actions to slash greenhouse gas emissions, including “reducing both consumption and production of fossil fuels” by 2050. But it said nothing about deeply cutting fossil fuel use this decade, and the use of “could” made the action optional.
That provoked outrage from many COP28 delegates.
“The Republic of the Marshall Islands did not come here to sign our death warrant,” said John Silk, the minister of natural resources for the nation of atolls in the Pacific Ocean. “We will not go silently to our watery graves.”
Sultan Al Jaber, the man charged with leading the proceedings (who is also head of the U.A.E.’s state oil company), managed to keep the fossil fuel debate at bay for the first several days of the event with a series of smaller agreements, including funding for a loss and damage fund and commitments to limit methane.
But before long, the debate over the future of fossil fuels burst into the open. A video of Al Jaber saying there was “no science” to support a phaseout sparked an uproar. The head of OPEC told members to block any deal that called for curbing fossil fuels. And Azerbaijan, another petrostate with a troubling human rights record, was selected to host next year’s COP.
Talks are still ongoing, and there could yet be a breakthrough that delivers on Al Jaber’s promise for a “high-ambition” COP28. But for now, the gulf between those who want to create a future without fossil fuels, and those determined to maintain them, seems as wide as ever.
We’ll be back with a final analysis of COP28 soon.
More COP28 news
The revolution of tiny electric vehicles
Big Oil is up against a tiny foe on the streets of Asia and Africa. The noisy, noxious vehicles that run on two and three wheels, carrying billions of people daily, are quietly going electric.
In Kenya and Rwanda, dozens of start-ups are vying to replace oil-guzzling motorcycle taxis with battery-powered ones. In India, more than half of all new three-wheeled vehicles sold and registered this year were battery-operated. Indonesia and Thailand are also encouraging electrification of motorcycle taxis.
The shift to electric vehicles overall has reduced global oil demand by 1.8 million barrels a day, according to BloombergNEF. Two- and three-wheelers account for 60 percent of that decline.
Taken together, cars and smaller electric vehicles are projected to displace only 4 percent of total oil demand this year. Still, their growth is vital to the energy transition because transportation accounts for about 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The big shift to tiny electric vehicles is underappreciated in the United States and Europe, where, despite the popularity of electric bicycles and scooters, the focus has been mainly on cars.
But most of the world doesn’t roll on four wheels.
“Electric bikes are quieter, much more efficient and good for the environment,” said Jesse Forrester, the founder of Mazi Mobility, which has 60 electric motorcycle taxis on the roads in Nairobi. “There’s a quiet revolution now in Kenya driving this transformation for the future.”
— Somini Sengupta, Abdi Latif Dahir, Alex Travelli and Clifford Krauss
Read the full article here.
