For the first time since nations began meeting three decades ago to confront climate change, diplomats from nearly 200 countries approved a global pact that explicitly calls for “transitioning away from fossil fuels” like oil, gas and coal that are dangerously heating the planet.
The sweeping agreement, which comes during the hottest year in recorded history, was reached on Wednesday after two weeks of furious debate at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai. European leaders and many of the nations most vulnerable to climate-fueled disasters were urging language that called for a complete “phaseout” of fossil fuels. But that proposal faced intense pushback from major oil exporters like Saudi Arabia and Iraq, as well as fast-growing countries like India and Nigeria.
In the end, negotiators struck a compromise: The new deal calls on countries to accelerate a global shift away from fossil fuels this decade in a “just, orderly and equitable manner,” and to quit adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere entirely by midcentury. It also calls on nations to triple the amount of renewable energy, like wind and solar power, installed around the world by 2030 and to slash emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas that is more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term.
While past U.N. climate deals have urged countries to reduce emissions, they have shied away from explicitly mentioning the words “fossil fuels,” even though the burning of oil, gas and coal is the primary cause of global warming.
Al Jazeera:
COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber hailed the deal, approved by almost 200 countries on Wednesday, as an “historic package” of measures that offers a “robust plan” to keep the target of capping global temperatures at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, within reach.
“We have language on fossil fuel in our final agreement for the first time ever,” said al-Jaber, CEO of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) oil company Adnoc.
Officials from around the globe suggested the deal is an important step towards ending the use of fossil fuels.
US climate envoy John Kerry said that both the United States and China intend to update their long-term climate strategies, hailing the agreement as one which “sends very strong messages to the world”.
However, the deal doesn’t go so far as to seek a “phase-out” of fossil fuels, for which more than 100 nations had pleaded. Rather, it calls for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade”.
That transition would be in a way that gets the world to net zero greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 and follows the dictates of climate science.
Should have held COP28 in the UAE in August instead of December.