Rich countries’ hypocrisy and chicanery was in full show at COP28

livemint.com:

Let him cast the first stone, he who has not sinned, said Jesus Christ. He was admonishing a crowd gathered to stone a woman of sin, one Mary Magdalene. He might have said the same thing at the Dubai climate summit, addressing the delegates from the rich world hollering for an early elimination of fossil fuels.

Much of the liberal press has joined a campaign to condemn a COP hosted by the UAE, a leading petrostate, as scheming to thwart early elimination of fossil fuels. As it turns out, COP28 has produced a declaration calling on the world to transition away from fossil fuels, so as to reach net zero emissions of CO2 by 2050, “consistent with science". That still leaves some climate puritans fuming at the COP’s failure to use their preferred phrase, ‘phase out fossil fuels’.

This, at a summit whose main goal was a global ‘stocktake’, taking stock of how countries have delivered on past commitments on reducing emissions. The UN agency charged with that task found big gaps between word and deed, and has called for deeper cuts. The facts are as follows.

The Sixth Assessment Report presented to the Glasgow COP in 2021 already showed the world was on course to miss the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. The science estimates that, between 1850 and 2019, the world has already injected 2,400 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent of warming gases into the atmosphere, give or take 10%, raising the global average temperature by 1.1 degrees C, already. It also found that the amount of additional carbon required to make that temperature rise 1.5 degrees C was 500 Gt.