In a first, COP28 targets the root cause of climate change
As activists and diplomats first assembled in Dubai for Cop28, the UN’s climate summit, a fortnight ago, the chances of significant progress seemed slim. War had returned to the Middle East and the geopolitical order was fragmenting. The choice of the summit’s host country—the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s leading petrostates—and its chairman, Sultan al-Jaber, the head of its national oil company, threatened to turn the event into a giant exercise in greenwashing.
Instead, Cop28 defied the pessimists. For the first time the world has agreed to move away from the coal, oil and natural gas that are the principal causes of global warming. The 198 parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed on a text that called for a transition away from fossil fuels “in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner".
Some will be disappointed at the compromises made. The Europeans had hoped to agree to “phase out" fossil fuels entirely, to which fossil-fuel producers refused to sign up. Small island countries say their voices were not heard.
The deal states that only “unabated" coal power will be phased down, leaving the option of the dirtiest fuel continuing to be burnt as long as its emissions are captured at source. Nonetheless, the document is an important, and realistic, step forward. The call to phase out fossil fuels was both politically naive and economically unfeasible.
COP operates by consensus, meaning that the big petrostates had a veto on any deal. Moreover, fossil fuels are likely to remain part of the energy mix for decades to come. Even optimistic forecasts suggest a substantial role for oil and gas, balanced by technologies that remove their greenhouse-gas emissions, in scenarios
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