The CoP-28 deal left a major question out: Who will pay and for what?
Like over-caffeinated college students, Sultan Al Jaber, John Kerry and other CoP-28 delegates pulled an all-nighter to turn what could have been an ‘F’ grade on a global climate deal into a respectable ‘C.’ Still, in their scramble to produce a historic pact, they left a glaring omission that could doom the whole enterprise in the longer run. They ignored the money constraint. Give credit where it’s due: The end product of this year’s UN climate conclave, an agreement that the world needs to stop using fossil fuels, was the first of its kind and a drastic improvement over most CoPs, which are usually failures.
Until a few years ago, these grand declarations barely acknowledged the existence of fossil fuels. As Javier Blas notes, the final text has the fingerprints of Saudi Arabia and other big fossil-fuel producers all over it. Loopholes abound, including unseemly attention to carbon capture and storage, an expensive and unproven technology that oil producers likely hope will keep their expensive assets from being stranded underground.
This is an inevitable result of the CoP process, which requires buy-in from every single party—from polluters like the US to those on the front lines of global heating dangers like the Maldives. But perhaps the biggest omission is the absence of firm promises by rich countries to help their poorer cousins meet the commitment to ditch fossil fuels by mid-century. Developing nations will need at least $6 trillion in financing by 2030 to reach this goal, the UN has estimated.
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