The United Nations on Wednesday accused nations of “posturing” at the COP28 talks after a first-day blur of rare quick action and agreement, as negotiators finished up their first week in a more familiar place for them: The murky middle where momentum and roadblocks intertwine.
U.N. Climate Secretary Simon Stiell said countries at the critical summit need to aim high and agree on ending the “fossil fuel era as we know it,” as tension over the future of coal, oil and gas came to the fore.
Stiell was speaking as the two-week conference in Dubai approached its midpoint after the opening flurry of announcements and pledges had died down and attention turned to behind-the-scenes negotiations.
“All governments must give their negotiators clear marching orders. We need highest ambition, not point-scoring or lowest common denominator politics,” Stiell told a news conference.
“Negotiations, as are often the case, are a mixed picture right now. We see big differences between individual states in some areas,” German climate envoy Jennifer Morgan said, “but there is a will to make progress.”
Proponents who are calling for a ground-shifting phase-out of fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal have hope for the first time in years, but they also see where it could be torpedoed. Officials said that key issues of financial help for poor nations to decarbonize and how to adapt to warming need much more work.
That is in contrast to the first day when the conference implemented a climate compensation fund – called loss-and-damage – and started seeing its coffers grow to more than $720 million.
Stiell warned against putting “a tick on the box” for that victory and thinks it solves the multitrillion-dollar financial aid problem needed to help cut emissions worldwide.
“We need COP to deliver a bullet train to speed up climate action. We currently have an old caboose chugging over rickety tracks,” he said.
Adnan Amin, the No. 2 official in the COP presidency official and a veteran United Nations diplomat, was a bit more optimistic, saying all negotiations have both an up period and depressing times. This one, he said, is in that time where “there’s still a buzz. There’s’ still positivity.”
Discussions have been focused on the so-called Global Stocktake – a status of where nations are at with meeting their climate goals to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial times and how they can get there. On Tuesday, negotiators produced a new draft of the text, but it had so many possibilities in its 24 pages that it didn’t give too much of a hint of what will be agreed upon when the session ends next week.
Negotiators for 197 countries are going over the document word by word to see what they can live with and what they can’t; Amin said: “They have so many demands and needs. But I think it provides a very good basis for moving forward.”
“We have a starting text on the table ... but it’s’ a grab bag of wish lists and heavy on posturing. The key now is to sort the wheat from the chaff,” Stiell said.
With the world way off track in meeting its climate goals, Stiell urged the delegations to make progress that matters.
“There are many options that are on the table right now that speak to phasing out of fossil fuels. It is for parties to unpick that, but come up with a very clear statement that signals the terminal decline of the fossil fuel era as we know it.”
The European Union called for COP28 to “mark the beginning of the end” of planet-warming fossil fuels.
“All 27 European member states want this to be part of the negotiated outcome,” European Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra said on Wednesday.
Cedric Schuster, the chair of the Association of Small Island States, said failing on the global stocktake would “make it significantly more difficult to leave this COP saying we can achieve the 1.5 Celsius limit.” He said major emitters and developed countries must take the lead and ramp up efforts to phase out fossil fuels.
“If we fail, the consequences will be catastrophic,” he said.
While U.N. officials highlight worries about finance and adaptation, many at the Dubai conference are focused on language about what to do about fossil fuels. Burning coal, oil and natural gas are the chief causes of climate change. For the first time in nearly three decades of talks, the idea of getting rid of all three of them is on the agenda and a serious possibility.
But issues about language, timing and meaning – especially defining terms – are far from settled. Some use phase-down as less stringent, along with the term “unabated” tossed in front of fossil fuels. When asked to define “unabated,” Stiell said that’s up to negotiators.
“We have seen options about fossil fuel phase-out in the text. And while it’s historic to have them, they’re not enough,” said environmental activist Romain Ioualalen of Oil Change International. He pointed to 106 nations signing a document calling for a phase-out, which was mentioned by many world leaders when they made speeches in the first few days.
“The situation we’re in right now, it was unthinkable just three COPs ago to have these debates on the phase-out of all fossil fuels,” Ioualalen said. “There’s momentum in the conversation. There’s opposition, of course. And that’s that’s to that’s to be expected. But that’s what we need to solve.”
“We’ve never been closer to an agreement for sure,” he said.
“If there is some disagreement between ‘phase-out’ and ‘phase-down,’ let’s all agree there should be no disagreement that oil demand in 2050 has to be a fraction of what it is today if not zero,” said Jason Bordoff, director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “We are fighting over ‘phase-out’ or ‘phase-down’ while oil demand rises yearly.”
Wednesday’s’ sessions focused on transport, the second-leading sector for the carbon dioxide emissions warming the planet, with panels like building out electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure and decarbonizing urban freight transportation.
Despite the rapid growth of electric vehicles in some countries, oil still accounts for nearly 91% of the energy used in the transport sector, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). It’s’ a sector that includes hard-to-decarbonize industries like aviation and shipping, where cutting emissions will require big ramp-ups in producing sustainable aviation fuel for airplanes and alternative fuels like hydrogen for ships.
Wednesday was a day for negotiators to talk about moving people around the world in transportation systems that produce less carbon emissions. Yet, when U.N. officials were asked how much carbon pollution was caused by bringing more than 100,000 people to Dubai, they said they had no figures but that the gathering was worth it.
