Delegates at the UN climate conference in Dubai (COP28) enter the final leg of negotiations amid deep differences over whether the final agreement should incorporate the “phasing out” of fossil fuels or just a “reduction”, among other disputed options. The speech on Saturday by the Chinese delegate at the summit, Xie Zhenhua, radiated some optimism; but the differences are profound. Closing is scheduled for Tuesday.
The central issue at COP28 is whether, for the first time in history, the nearly 200 UN countries embrace an eventual end to the era of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas), albeit without a concrete timetable . Scientists point to fossil fuels as responsible for the gas emissions that are warming the Earth to dangerous limits.
More than 80 countries, including the US, the EU, small island states, African nations and Latin American countries are pushing for this “phase-out”, while Saudi Arabia (backed by OPEC) has left it is perfectly clear that he does not “absolutely” agree with these ideas. Any agreement requires the consensus of all.
The discussion focuses on the global balance sheet, a document that reviews compliance with the Paris Agreement, and the conclusions of which must mark the future orientations for the new climate action plans that countries must present in 2024. About on the table there are several proposals, including the one that proposes to delete any reference to this very difficult issue. The axis of the debate revolves around the option he advocates to “accelerate efforts for a progressive elimination of fossil fuels” that do not have gas mitigation technologies (that is, that do not have systems to capture and store CO2i prevent them from being released into the atmosphere). Another option expresses the same idea, but focused only on coal.
One of the key issues in the negotiation is the battle to exclude from this “phasing out” (of fossil energy) CO2 capture and storage technologies, which absorb and fix these emissions underground (and which, therefore prevent them from being released into the atmosphere). However, these systems are not applied on a large scale, they are expensive and their capacity to trap gases is reduced.
The EU admits that eliminating fossil fuels “cannot be done overnight”, according to its European Commissioner for Climate Action, Wopke Hoekstra, who makes it clear that carbon capture and storage technologies (CCS, for the their acronyms in English) must be reserved for the most difficult sectors to decarbonize (steel, cement…)
The position of China, which no longer appears as a country blocking the agreement, will be crucial; and hints that he will accept some kind of compromise. Its special envoy, Zie Zhenhua, does not clarify whether China supports or opposes the phase-out of fossil fuels. Even so, he recalled that his country and the US agreed in November (in a meeting in California with Johan Kerry) to “massively promote the deployment of renewable energy” and that this impetus “will be used to gradually and orderly replace the generation of energy using oil, gas and coal, so that we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions”. The agreement, therefore, does not speak of a “gradual elimination” of fossil energy, but of cutting emissions.
But not everything depends on China. The resistance to the gradual “exit” of fossil fuels does not come from a single country, but comes from “several fronts”, as explained to this newspaper by Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who was president of the climate conference in Peru on 2012. The opposition also comes from countries that fear that “a very strict exit from fossil fuels could limit their development projections”. Some of these allude to the fact that the transition to renewables means sources of financing that they do not have. Hence the importance of the financial package that comes out of the summit.
The conference launched some notable commitments, including a goal by some 130 countries to triple renewable energy deployment and double efficiency by 2020, and an agreement by 50 companies to reduce methane emissions to zero and eliminate routine burning in torches by 2030.
However, an analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA) indicates that the fulfillment of these commitments would only result in a 30% reduction in 2030 of what is needed to close the fracture and set a path compatible with limit heating to 1.5º C.
