The IEA found that emissions from the advanced economies actually fell in 2023, although global emissions increased slightly, by 1.1%. The report says, “After falling by around 4.5% in 2023, emissions in advanced economies were lower than they were fifty years ago in 1973.”

Emissions have fallen in the advanced economies before, as with the 2020 COVID pandemic, the 2008-2009 deep recession, and during economic downturns in the 1970s and 1980s.

The reason the new findings are so heartening, however, is that in 2023 emissions from the advanced economies fell even though they experienced economic growth. A 4.5% fall in emissions from countries with an expanding GDP is unprecedented in the hydrocarbon era. The advanced economies grew by 1.7%.

The fall in emissions would have been even greater, but drought in China and elsewhere caused hydroelectric production to fall last year. This finding should reinforce for us how, the longer we leave the climate crisis unsolved, the harder it becomes to solve it.

This finding is a slap in the face to figures such as past COP chairman Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber of the United Arab Emirates. In a testy exchange with Mary Robinson, chair of the Elders, last fall, Al-Jaber said, “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”

Mr. Al-Jaber, meet the IEA. In 2023, the advanced economies grew and developed, but they cut their carbon dioxide production by over 4% nevertheless. And that is the future of the world. Petroleum will still have a value, for instance in petro-chemicals such as fertilizer, but it will increasingly not be burned for fuel to power vehicles.

Carbon dioxide emissions are produced in lots of ways, from burning gasoline in vehicles, from heating homes and businesses, and from electricity production. Some 2/3s of the reduction in CO2 last year took place in the electricity sector. This is a testament to the vast build-out in the US, Europe, and China, of wind and solar power. Renewables accounted for over a third of electricity generation in 2023.

At the same time, coal fell to only 17% of electricity production. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel and needs to be phased out entirely. Some coal was replaced instead by fossil gas, which isn’t as good, but still cuts CO2 emissions by half. Replacing coal with solar and wind would cut them to almost zero.

A piece of very good news is that coal use in the advanced economies has fallen to 1900 levels. That is still way too high– we need to get back to 1750 and drop coal entirely. But it is a remarkable accomplishment compared even to a decade ago.

The figures for Europe are even more striking. There, CO2 emissions were reduced by nearly 9% last year! These countries, however, experienced weaker growth than the average of the OECD, at 0.7%. In Europe, fully half of the decline of carbon dioxide output was owing to growth in clean energy.

One takeaway from the finding that emissions fell in advanced countries but still rose by a percentage point globally is that the wealthier nations must now increasingly invest in green energy in the developing world. The climate doesn’t care where you live. The moment we hit 2.7° F. above the preindustrial average, there is some reason to think that there will be an immediate big crop failure. Greening our global energy isn’t an abstract ideal. We have to do it to keep our children and grandchildren from starving or becoming climate refugees.

Featured Image: “Clean Air and Earth,” Digital, Dream/ Dreamland v. 3, 2024.

(The Conversation) – As the climate crisis escalates, there are urgent and difficult choices that need to be made to drastically reduce our carbon emissions before more irreparable damage is done.

Many have argued the energy industry needs to change to reduce carbon emissions, but one concern that remains is the consequence this will have on economic prosperity.

Discussions vary across interest groups. Do we need to outright replace the fossil fuel industry with the renewable energy industry as soon as possible? Should we slowly phase out fossil fuels while making clean renewable replacements? Or, should we continue with a powerful fossil fuel industry while separately growing a renewable industry in parallel?

How these different choices could impact our economies seems unclear, and it is this lack of clarity that opens up the field for frustrating discussions. At the recent COP28 climate summit in the United Arab Emirates, the conference president shockingly said that there is “no science” behind any decision to phase-out fossil fuels from our energy systems — a statement which he later claimed was “misinterpreted.”

My recent research examines energy industry restructuring options for a green transition to renewable energy from an economic perspective.

Although economic analysis is helpful, it is not sufficient on its own for making these important decisions. So, my research also draws on sustainability which involves considering the conditions faced by future generations, and a concept known as equifinality reminding us to keep our minds open to many possible approaches that may satisfy the same objectives.

Renewable energy innovation and GDP

My research indicates that renewable energy innovation contributes to higher GDP. Contrary to some commonly held beliefs, a clean transition is, and has been for at least a decade, good for the economy — even in earlier stages of its development.

My findings also suggest that government and industry support for the fossil fuel industry negatively affects a country’s renewable energy innovation. The two industries are not compatible.

When the fossil fuel industry invests in itself, it also appears to improve GDP, which creates confusion about the best way to ensure economic prosperity while transitioning to clean energy.

Image by Jukka Niittymaa from Pixabay

But this investment, often made through lobbying, only prolongs the existence of the fossil fuel industry by keeping renewable energy competition out. This creates a false dichotomy between reducing emissions and improving GDP when, in fact, clean innovation can achieve both simultaneously.

My research indicates that clean innovation makes a stronger economy and reduces emissions. If we want to reinforce that dual progress, rather than accepting trade-offs, then we have to stop supporting the fossil fuel industry which aims to slow it down.

Helping renewable energy thrive

Economically speaking, the fossil fuel industry is negatively impacting consumer welfare by maintaining higher-than-necessary prices due to limited competition. This, in turn, bumps up GDP through inflated profits, having subsidised an already dominant polluting industry, reducing clean innovation and delaying cleaner progress — obviously not the way to grow a healthy economy.

In fact, GDP is not a standard of living measure or a measure of innovative competitiveness. To address inflation and the cost of living crisis, we should be promoting more competition across industries. This is a more productive type of capitalism that brings wider benefits to all of us, including more innovation, lower prices, and better products for domestic and export markets.

Government subsidies that boost the fossil fuel industry hinder consumer welfare and the transition to clean energy. Some examples include subsidies to fund more carbon capture and storage technology and the use of fossil energy in hydrogen storage systems.

Instead of funding these backward subsidies, governments should implement pollution taxes while also supporting renewable energy innovation.

My research demonstrates that pollution taxes work well with clean innovation capabilities. Supporting research and innovation in renewable energy and using a carbon tax as a tool can boost the economic benefits of transitioning to clean energy.

The findings of my work suggest that a robust economy is related to industry restructuring so that renewable energy innovation can thrive. Fostering novel scientific discoveries in clean energy innovation should be prioritized while reducing non-competitive industry formations and organizations, such as fossil fuel oligopolies and industry associations.

Making decisions with the future in mind

Increasing public awareness and understanding of fossil fuel industry games is a way to accelerate change. It’s important to recognize that industries at different life cycle stages contribute to the economy in different ways.

A newer rising industry with determined entrepreneurs, like that of renewable energy, invests in innovation to create value. On the other hand, a declining industry plays end-game strategies, like engaging in self-promotional activities, to maintain their existing position and create barriers to new industry entries.

However, consumer welfare increases with competition, not collusion. Economic analysis is not sufficient on its own for decision-making in this area because positive economic outcomes can be generated by different kinds of strategies supporting an industry’s life cycle goals.

Government policy decisions should be made based on economic analyses alongside broader sustainability criteria. Ignoring the equifinality argument and reverting to discussions about replacing coal with gas as a bridge only ensures fossil fuels remain in use for at least another generation of infrastructure.

Communities should apply sustainability and equifinality lenses to decision-making, understanding that there are many possible means to an end. For example, if a community has specific concerns about one type of renewable energy system, they should explore other alternative clean energy options instead of defaulting to fossil fuels.

An educated public should reject simplistic and single-sided arguments and understand there are usually more nuanced solutions to problems supported by evidence-based analysis. By embracing a more holistic approach, we can develop more sustainable societies by opening up renewable energy possibilities.

Deborah de Lange, Associate Professor, Global Management Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This essay was originally published in Foreign Policy in Focus

Just before the recent climate summit in Dubai, COP28 president Sultan Al-Jaber, with some exasperation, came out with the following rather amazing statement:

“Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”

Al-Jabar was posturing when he made this quip about caves, but he can almost be forgiven. We badly need a roadmap for a “phase out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development.” By noting the lack of one, he underscored its absence. This is true even if he spoke as a flack of the fossil fuel cartel.

Speaking of COP28, it helped settle the question of the COPs, which still troubles the climate left. The COPs are easily dismissed as “blah blah blah.” But they are, in a word, necessary. We would be in far greater trouble without them, and this is true even though the COPs are condemned to make decisions by consensus, even though they engender endless greenwashing, even though, with next year’s COP29 slated for Azerbaijan, two in a row will be hosted by straight-up petrostates.

The climate negotiations are finally circling core issues. COP26 saw a decision to “phase down” coal, and COP28 opened with the Loss and Damage fund finally lurching into existence. Then came COP28’s key decision text, which called for “Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” Only a month later—with President Biden’s move to “pause” the approval of new liquified natural gas terminals, a decision the White House explicitly linked to COP28— the COP decision demonstrated real world benefits. It could have many more in the future, including outside the United States.

Meanwhile, COP29 is set to see the next big battle begin in earnest, as climate finance takes center stage. This battle could (if all goes well) culminate in 2025, where COP30 will be hosted by Lula da Sila’s Brazil, and deliver a meaningful decision on that crucial front. This is not the time to performatively insist that COP stands for “conference of polluters.”

Having said all this, I must immediately add that the climate negotiations have thus far failed, as decisively witnessed by the steadily rising atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration. COP skeptics are quite right about this. But in their failure the international negotiations are hardly alone. Domestic climate action has had many victories, but it has hardly put us on a path to deep and rapid decarbonization. Nor has the green technology revolution brought planetary emissions into a peak-and-decline pathway. Nor—and this is not easy to say—have the world’s direct action and climate justice movements filled the gaps. Politically, they may be everything, but they too have failed to stop the warming.

One key point: the COP28 text does not simply call for transitioning away from fossil fuels but rather stipulates that this transition must be “just, orderly, and equitable,” a much more challenging prospect. This led Sivan Kartha, a climate equity specialist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, to add that the “deepest fissure” in Dubai was between those who simply want a rapid fossil phase out and those who insist that, to have any hope of success, such a phase out must be fair.

Many of us agree—but what does such fairness imply? 

Embracing “Climate Emergency”

It has become fashionable, yet again, to argue that terms like “climate emergency” are dangerously demoralizing. Perhaps they are. Unfortunately, they are also accurate. We really do have to aim for net-zero emission by 2050, and that means facing political-economic challenges that are difficult to exaggerate. As are those posed by the closely related 1.5°C temperature goal. 

A graphic is appropriate here. I chose this one:

So far, the temperature spike we saw in 2023 is just temporary. For details, see here.

There are lots of voices telling us that 1.5°C is no longer achievable, but this is not quite true. Rather, 1.5°C remains achievable, but only via “overshoot and decline” pathways in which, sometime after the warming grinds past 1.5°C, we manage to claw it back down. What must we do to improve our chances? This is the real question.

We’re going to go into 1.5°C overshoot soon. As we do, even if we assume we’ll be able to draw the temperature back down, we can’t know how extreme the overshoot will be, or how long it will last. We can’t know because it depends on what happens in the future! Some people, Marxist climate hawk Andreas Malm among them, do not think we’ll be able to pull off the necessary drawdown (“I’m not an optimist about the human project”), though he agrees that it is technically possible. 

If we seriously intend to keep 1.5°C alive (as a long-term goal—think 2100), we must in the short term do everything to keep the temperature peak “well below 2°C” (the weak end of the Paris target), which is widely judged, by top scientists, to still be achievable. But there’s a hitch. Even this weaker goal demands, per the IPCC, “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” It’s not going to happen in the world as we have it today. 

If, in 2050, we are approaching true net-zero planetary emissions, we’ll have a good chance of avoiding a world in which the cascading consequences of the warming become unmanageable. Very rapidly building low- and ultra-low emissions energy systems around the world is a necessary step towards that goal—and because such systems are emerging, and rapidly dropping in cost, it’s possible to be honestly optimistic. But such systems are not going to be enough. 

Net-zero 2050 means going beyond the deployment of new, ultra-low emissions infrastructure to also eliminate existing fossil fuel infrastructure. This means that virtually all countries, be they rich or poor, developed or developing, should immediately stop investing in fossil fuel infrastructure, not least because that infrastructure will have to be decommissioned—shut down, mothballed, stranded—long before it’s worn out. All countries must also very rapidly decommission the fossil fuel infrastructure (e.g. existing oil wells, old coal plants) they already have in place—even if it’s profitable and even if people depend on it for their livelihoods. Such a decommissioning process is going to be both expensive and disruptive, in both political and economic terms, and in ways that are particularly hard on poor and insecure populations. 

In a world geared for rapid transition, these would be tractable challenges, but that would be a world in which we were speaking honestly about the depth and profundity of the necessary transformation, a world in which we were, as per Australian author and analyst David Spratt, in “emergency mode.” This, obviously, is not our world, which still tends towards greenwashing, soft-pedaling, and small-bore gradualism, if not actual denialism and climate “brightsiding.”

League of Conservation Voters Video: “A New England Case Study: Accelerating the Clean Energy Transition Through Offshore Wind”

The encouraging possibilities are real, don’t get me wrong.

The green technology revolution really does make it possible for us to save ourselves, and to build new futures. But we’re still facing almost impossible strategic challenges, and justice is at the heart of many of them. Brave choices are going to be necessary, and a political movement that tries to avoid them will not do well when push comes to shove. As it will, within the lifetimes of our children. 

A global extraction phase out

It will be very difficult to engineer a sufficiently rapid phase out of fossil fuel consumption. But the difficulties are even greater when it comes to fossil fuel extraction and production. Think mining, and drilling, and fracking.

There are rich countries like the United States and Norway, which are heavily invested in oil and gas extraction. High-poverty developing countries, like South Africa and India, are heavily invested in coal, while the Democratic Republic of Congo is highly dependent on oil revenue to provide public services. Gulf oil exporters like the United Arab Emirates, the COP28 host, was a developing country before it struck oil. Today, though the UAE may not be “developed” in the same way as, say, the United States or Germany, it is nonetheless a wealthy, high-capacity country with the money and resources to buffer the turbulence that will come with any rapid abandonment of oil.

Which countries deserve more time before they have to stop extracting and selling fossil fuels? The question haunts the climate negotiations, but it is not, in an important sense, the right question at all. The greater truth is that we must do everything to stop the fossil energy pipeline, globally and as soon as possible, and the right question is which countries need support—financial, political, and technological support—before they can hope to rapidly break their dependency on fossil fuel extraction. 

All extracting countries plead their cases. The most legitimate pleas come from poor developing countries that are highly dependent on fossil-related revenues and livelihoods. But before this can become obvious, a point of potential confusion must be clearly acknowledged – lots of countries call themselves developing, but some of them are a lot richer than others. The good news is that this confusion is dissipating, for reasons that were easy to appreciate in Dubai, the global city of the United Arab Emirate. The UAE, like Saudi Arabia, is an extremely wealthy Gulf oil exporter that, while still officially a member of the “Group of 77” developing countries, is not a developing country at all.

Why must we say this? Because we must transition away from fossil fuels in a “just, orderly, and equitable” manner, and because – as the challenge of a fossil fuel extraction phase out makes particularly clear – such a transition is going to be extremely difficult. It is also going to be expensive, which immediately raises the “who pays?” question. Those who wish to evade this question—there are many, and they tend to be rich—seek delay by any available means, and it is important to stress that in the next 10 years aggressively rosy predictions about carbon-dioxide removal—which would, if real, make a perfect case for delay—seem certain to play a leading role in their strategies. 

In this situation, with uncertainty layered upon complexity upon emergency, optimism is as much a danger as pessimism. For one thing, it is not at all obvious that we will manage to rapidly draw temperatures back down after they overshoot 1.5°C—Malm’s pessimism may, in the end, be well placed. For another, all efforts to honestly face the severity of our situation will be endlessly harried by soft-pedaling, false solutions, dangerous distractions, and lies. Politicians everywhere will want all the wiggle room they can get, and meanwhile the fossil cartel will move at every opportunity to deflect all efforts to mandate, or even discuss, the strategic demands of an actual planetary fossil-fuel phase out. 

Al-Jaber was right: we need that roadmap. 

On the ground, with war in the air

The climate negotiations are marked by endless skirmishing between global North and global South, which will not abate anytime soon. How could it, when our world – and its crises – are still strongly structured by the “uneven and combined development” of the colonial past, and the countries of the global North still host the majority of the world’s wealth?

Despite this skirmishing, which has for decades kept fossil fuels off the negotiating agenda, COP28 saw the fossil phaseout challenge finally take center stage. Activists and diplomats alike saw this challenge as a litmus test that would show if the climate negotiations were fit for purpose. Will the negotiations take up the challenge, or can they be forever derailed and distracted, while the fossil cartel just continues its relentless expansion? Perhaps we’ll know in a few years, but just now, after Dubai, a bit of guarded optimism may actually be in order. 

Not everyone in Dubai connected the brutal logic of the climate reckoning to the larger geopolitical crisis, but this crisis hung palpably in the air. COP28 took place in the Arab world, and Gaza did not seem so very far away. The atrocity of the Israeli bombing continued day by excruciating day, and it did not seem that it could be entirely separated from the discussions in the conference halls. The pain was acute within civil society circles. Demonstrations took place, and though they were marginalized by the COP’s security regime, they were noticed. Importantly, the ethos of the protests was an expansive one. The bombing, in particular, was not an isolated consequence of local hatreds. There were larger forces at work. The Palestinians had been given to champion the global South. The United States—the same United States that refused all talk of climate liability—was more than implicated. The term “settler colonialism” was heard again and again. The war, and war in general, was not a distant abstraction.

COPs are not mere climate meetings. The talk is not confined to carbon budgets and energy-system transformation. International debt relief, for example, is now front and center, as is the need for a radically new planetary finance architecture. The global military budget—now over $2 trillion a year—is a common point of comparison, and a reminder that we routinely subsidize violence on a vast scale. The problem of climate is the problem of history, and history is suddenly a very big problem. As the Financial Times noted,

The anecdotal evidence that war is surging round the world is confirmed by the numbers. A recent report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies documented 183 ongoing conflicts around the world, the highest number in more than three decades. And that figure was arrived at before the outbreak of the war in Gaza.

The fraying of the world order is, obviously, a threat to climate cooperation. Beyond this, and beyond the fading illusion that the climate challenge will yield to simple interventions, we’re still only beginning to come to terms with its implacable sprawl. There is little chance of climate stabilization without a political-economic shift that makes robust cooperation possible, but such a shift isn’t going to come cheaply and easily, and simple stories will not help trigger it. How could they when the riddle of climate stabilization is as well the riddle of development, and the riddle of peace?

The Gaza bombing is now on the agenda of the International Court of Justice, where it has joined a crowded docket that includes climate change lawsuits and all manner of other infamies. Nor can these all be laid entirely at the feet of the global North. The two million people of Gaza are currently, and justly, in the spotlight, but spare a thought for another two million people, the Rohingya of Myanmar, who have been murdered and expelled by a huge and terrifying wave of anti-Muslim violence. Southern elites are not innocent. 

And don’t forget Russia’s war in Ukraine, which, in addition to its immediate murderous consequences, is a milestone in the global right’s campaign against collective action, including climate action. It has certainly been an enormous setback to the Russian activist campaign for carbon neutrality.

Spinning the outcome

During COP28’s second week, the negotiations were roiled by the leak of a letter that Haitham al-Ghais, the OPEC secretary general, had sent to the 13 members of OPEC. The letter warned that “pressure against fossil fuels may reach a tipping point with irreversible consequences”, and argued that OPEC members must “proactively reject any text or formula that targets energy i.e. fossil fuels rather than emissions.” 

This was not an isolated move. There was also, by accounts, a great deal of arm twisting, and even a Saudi walkout. Jennifer Morgan, a long-time civil society climate strategist who is now Special Envoy at the German Foreign Ministry, went so far as to speculate that OPEC might be in “a bit of panic.” If so, the panic quickly passed. Once COP28 was over, the Saudis argued that the Dubai agreement to transition away from fossil fuels was entirely optional, just one of several “choices” on an “a la carte menu.”

There are two essential points here. The first is that the OPEC cartel, and the fossil cartel more generally, wants to prevent the “transitioning away” or “phasing out” or “phasing down” frames from taking hold, and argues that “emissions” (which can, it is said, be “captured”) are the real problem. This is the core of the greenwashing strategy, and its partisans will use all available arguments in its service, including repeated references to energy justice. Al-Ghais, for example, explains that “Our goal must be to reduce emissions, which is the core objective of the Paris Agreement, while ensuring energy security and universal access to affordable energy.” 

OPEC has no intention of scaling back fossil fuel extraction. This could change (one must hope) but there is absolutely no chance that it will do so unless the great powers of the global North have already taken the lead and begun their own fossil fuel extraction phase out. Which is why the Biden administration’s decision to scrutinize and hopefully reject a wave of new LNG export terminals, if it survives the counterattacks, could mark a decisive turning point. Talk, after all, is cheap, and just because a country’s delegation supported phase down/out at COP28 (as did the U.S. delegation) this doesn’t mean its actual decision makers are ready and able to follow through. At the COP, many of them clearly weren’t, as is crisply shown in this December 2023 graphic from Carbon Brief:

Some countries, or rather the fossil powers within those countries, are planning even greater production increases than the United States is. Some of these (India and Nigeria) are clearly developing countries, while some (Canada, Russia, and Saudi Arabia) are not. Most all fossil-rich countries, whether their history lay with the global North or the global South, are still planning on exploiting their coal, oil, and gas resources for as long as they possibly can, though do note that China is at the encouraging bottom of the chart. All told, despite its complexities, the picture is grim.

At the same time, the climate reckoning is arriving, and it finds us everywhere divided between rich and poor. In consequence, the countries of the global South can continue to make compelling appeals to basic levels of developmental justice, and these appeals cannot be easily dismissed, even when they bleed into PR cover for continued fossil investment. The energy poverty of the global South is deadly real, as is its pressing need—and its right—to a viable development path, as are the obstacles that today’s world system strews in its path.

(Note that this chart is somewhat out of date – Azerbaijan, which holds the COP29 presidency, has since COP28 announced that it is planning on raising its gas production by a third.)

Moving forward

To succeed, the fossil fuel phaseout roadmap must be reasonably detailed and properly funded. At the same time, it must sharply increase the development and build-out of low-carbon energy systems. In practice, this roadmap has to include nationally differentiated coal, oil, and gas extraction phaseout timeframes detailed enough to be useful to both government planners and political organizers, and financing strategies that can support them. 

Given the emergency, these phaseout timeframes will be extremely challenging, as befits the goal of net-zero emissions by or around 2050. We have to be realistic about this, but it’s not a traditional realism that we’re after. Traditional realism tells us that the necessary timeframes are unachievable, in large part because countries always hew to their “national interests,” which can be only slowly changed. Climate realism, on the other hand, tells us that it’s the pace of the necessary decarbonization, not the politics of the day, that is immutable, and that climate stabilization must come as a solution to a global collective action problem, in which national interests rapidly change. 

Collective action problems—commons problems—have a special relationship to justice. So, while I have no idea what the “orderly” part of “just, orderly, and equitable” is going to wind up meaning, I’m confident that justice and equity are going to be key to any successful climate transition. 

But what kind of justice? And what shape must it take? These questions bring us back to Al-Jaber’s roadmap, the one for a “phase out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development.” It’s a bear of a problem, but lots of people are working on it. For starters, look at the work of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative. Or Phaseout Pathways for Fossil Fuel Production within Paris-Compliant Carbon Budgets, the Tyndell Centre report that Dan Calverley and Kevin Anderson published in 2022. Or Economic Diversification from Oil Dependency, a report Vincent Yu, a key G77 negotiator, wrote for the Third World Network. Or the many reports of the Civil Society Equity Review, an international collaborative that, full disclosure, I work closely with. The conversation is still in its early days, but there are lots of good ideas floating around. 

Meanwhile, if we’re going to use terms like “economic diversification” and “developing countries,” let’s use them carefully. The challenges here involve “differentiation” between different kinds of countries and different kinds of circumstances, and they are anything but easy. The obvious example is the Gulf oil exporters like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. They may in some sense be developing countries, but they have the money to diversify their economies as they phase out fossil fuel extraction, in ways that other developing countries like Kenya or even India absolutely do not. Harder cases come when you consider China, a hybrid that is both developed and developing, or when you take inequality within countries into proper account. For example, Saudi Arabia is traditionally considered to be a developing country, while the United States is the richest country in the world, but both are brutally divided between rich and poor. Somehow, this has to matter. 

At the end of the day, the biggest differentiation problem remains the one between the global North and the global South. The challenges here are now widely if not routinely recognized. In Dubai, soon after the COP28 decision was gaveled through, Avinash Persaud, now Barbados’ special climate envoy, noted that “Some activists were disappointed we didn’t commit to an immediate fossil fuel phase out. Still, without the trade, investment, and finance to achieve it, it would either have hit developing countries hardest or been meaningless.”

These points will have to be addressed as the finance challenge—the need for a global financial architecture that can support rapid climate transition—takes center stage. Which brings me to a new report – An Equitable Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Extraction: Towards a reference framework for a fast and fair rapid global phase out of coal, oil and gas—the preliminary version of which was released at COP28 by the Extraction Equity Working Group of the Civil Society Equity Review. 

I can’t summarize this report here—though it does sport a fine executive summary—but I do want to explain why its subtitle includes the words “towards a reference framework.” The explanation, basically, is that a detailed climate transition roadmap is not yet possible. An Equitable Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Extraction thus proposes a framework by which to judge the steps that can be taken in the next few years, to at least indicate if they are fair and ambitious enough to have a real chance. To this end, it concentrates on calculating coal, oil, and gas phaseout dates for all major fossil fuel producing countries—here’s a scatterplot with the oil dates; scroll right or left for coal and gas—and on estimating the minimum level of annual international public finance that will be needed to support these phase outs.

This minimum is denominated in “hundreds of billions of dollars” a year. 

An Equitable Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Extraction argues that, if we would limit warming to 1.5°C, all countries must immediately cease to build new fossil fuel extraction infrastructure. Further, wealthy fossil fuel producers whose overall economies are less dependent on fossil extraction—such as the United States, UK, Australia, Norway, Germany, and Canada—must phase out all fossil fuel extraction by 2031, while also providing significant financial support to poorer countries that are economically dependent on fossil fuel revenues and employment. Such poorer countries are given until 2050, though they too must be wrapping things up much earlier. 

One key point, in all this, should never be forgotten. The “unrealistic” nature of these dates is not the result of any equity-side logic—in which we try to model a fair phase out—but rather derives from the implacable constraints imposed by the Earth’s nearly-depleted 1.5°C emissions budget. To push these deadlines out, say to 2060 or 2070, we must either weaken our temperature goal or we must assume—as the geoengineers will incessantly encourage us to do—that gigatons upon gigatons of carbon-dioxide can very soon, and affordably, and safely, be collected and concentrated and “sequestered” away. 

Back to the ground

After Dubai, much of the left’s commentary focused on criticizing the late-game negotiations in which “phase out” was replaced by “transitioning away,” as if such diplomatic wordsmithing was only a watering down, as if it revealed the compromised truth at the core of a meaningless negotiation. For the activists embedded in the negotiations, the sense was different. They generally agreed that Dubai had “sent the necessary signal”—despite everything, the world’s governments have decided the fossil economy has to go.

Bill McKibben, to my mind, had the right take on this disagreement when he argued that the “transitioning away” phrase “will hang over every discussion from now on—especially the discussions about any further expansion of fossil fuel energy.” In a nutshell, he argued that the diplomats forged a tool and it’s up to us all to wield it.

The Dubai decision is of course limited. But its real weakness has more to do with loopholes and omissions than with any fine point of diplomatic wording. And the greatest of its omissions is financial: there is no agreement on how the phaseout will be funded. Harjeet Singh, now the Global Engagement Director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, put the overall picture succinctly and well,

A long-overdue direction to move away from coal, oil, and gas has been set. Yet, the resolution is marred by loopholes that offer the fossil fuel industry numerous escape routes, relying on unproven, unsafe technologies. The hypocrisy of wealthy nations, particularly the USA, as they continue to expand fossil fuel operations massively while merely paying lip service to the green transition, stands exposed. Developing countries, still dependent on fossil fuels for energy, income, and jobs, are left without robust guarantees for adequate financial support in their urgent and equitable transition to renewables. COP28 recognised the immense financial shortfall in tackling climate impacts, but the final outcomes fall disappointingly short of compelling wealthy nations to fulfil their financial responsibilities—obligations amounting to hundreds of billions, which remain unfulfilled.

Harjeet is being diplomatic when he refers to “hundreds of billions,” a figure that echoes the one used in the Equitable Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Extraction report. It seems to be the formulation of choice these days, at least when civil society researchers and activists want to assert financial markers large enough to move the window, but small enough to be taken as realistic.

It’s important to understand that figures of this scale refer to public monies—grants and grant equivalents—and that they’ve lately been sharing the stage with references to trillions, which are typically private monies framed as “investments.” As in Dubai’s high-level Leader’s Declaration, which spoke of the opportunities that lay in “investing $5-7tn annually in greening the global economy by 2030.” 

The elites, left to their own devices, are far more likely to deliver on ambitious private finance pledges than on ambitious public ones. Investment is something they know how to do. But a future defined by “investment” and “insurance” and “loans” and “aid” is unlikely be a future that takes proper account of even deep decarbonization, let alone the challenges of development in a climate-constrained world, let alone people-centered adaptation and an ethically defensible loss and damage response and recovery system. Which is to say that, unless we win a comprehensive climate finance breakthrough, all hope for a “fair, orderly, and equitable” transition will be abandoned in favor of a short-term neoliberal expediency that is unlikely to deliver the global just transition we actually need. 

The challenge here encompasses everything from the historical responsibility of the global North to the debt crisis now wracking the global South to the inequality crisis raging in both North and South. Not to mention the crisis of democracy and the endless techno-economic complexities of the great rebuilding that’s now on the horizon. Bracket all this for now, but know that the next international battle will be fought over finance. 

It’s about time. 

Tom Athanasiou

This essay was originally published in Foreign Policy in Focus

Action continues to fall far short of pledges, even as temperature and greenhouse gas records are repeatedly broken

Catherine Early

( China Dialogue ) – Countries must make far greater efforts to implement their climate strategies this decade to stand a chance of keeping global temperature rise within 1.5C (2.7F) of the pre-industrial average.

Continued delays will only increase the world’s reliance on uncertain carbon dioxide removal technologies (CDR), according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

In the most recent annual assessment of progress on global climate action, the Emissions Gap Report 2023, UNEP pointed to progress since the Paris Agreement. When it was adopted in 2015, greenhouse gas emissions were projected to rise 16% by 2030. Today, that increase is projected to be 3%.

But from now emissions must fall 28% by 2030 to keep temperature rise to 3.6F (2C), or 42% to stay within 2.7F (1.5C), and countries are failing to match this need with action, UNEP found.

Photo by Andreas Felske on Unsplash

Current climate policies will result in a rise of 3C this century. The increase will be limited to 5.2F (2.9C) if countries fully implement their national climate plans (known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs).

This could be kept to 4.5F (2.5C) if plans by developing countries, which are currently conditional on obtaining financial support, are carried out – since that would result in a 9% fall in emissions.  

In UNEP’s most optimistic scenario, where all conditional NDCs and net zero pledges are met, limiting temperature rise to 3.6F (2C) could be achieved, UNEP says. This scenario is considered to give at best a 14% chance of limiting warming to 2.7F (1.5C).

Now, 97 countries have pledged to meet net zero emissions, up from 88 last year. Pledges cover 81% of the world’s greenhouse gases (GHGs). However, the authors do not consider these pledges to be credible, pointing out that none of the G20 countries are reducing emissions at a pace consistent with their net-zero targets.

National net zero plans have several flaws, according to Anne Olhoff, chief scientific editor of the report. Many are not legally binding, or fail to have clear implementation plans, and there is a lack of targets between now and the dates when governments claim to be aiming for net zero, she says.

“But most importantly, emissions are still going up in countries that have put forward zero emission pledges. There are many ways to net zero, but at some point you need to peak and reduce. And the longer you wait until you peak, the more difficult it’s likely to be to actually get to net zero,” she says.

Under the Paris Agreement, ambition in the NDCs is designed to be ramped up over time. At COP28, which begins in Dubai at the end of November, countries will debate how to build new ambition under the first Global Stocktake. This will inform the next round of NDCs that countries should submit in 2025, which will have targets for 2035.

Countries should focus on implementing existing policies this decade, rather than pledging higher targets for 2030, says Olhoff.

“Whether or not the ambition of the 2030 targets is raised or not is less important than achieving those targets. If countries find that they can also strengthen ambition for 2030, that’s an added benefit,” she says.

The more action taken this decade, the more ambitious countries can be in their new targets for 2035, and the easier it will be to achieve those targets, she points out.

The report states that high-income and high-emitting countries among the G20 should take the most ambitious and rapid action, and provide financial and technical support to developing nations.

However, it adds that low- and middle-income countries already account for more than two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions. Development needs in these countries need to be met with economic growth that produces low emissions, such as by reducing energy demand and prioritising clean energy, it says.

“This is an extremely large and diverse group of countries, and the opportunities for low-emissions growth depend a lot on national circumstances,” Ohloff says. Proposed reforms to international finance through multilateral development banks should improve access to finance and the ability of developing countries to attract investment. Borrowing often costs a lot more in these countries than in developed ones, she says. 

But some countries who suffer from corruption need to “get their own house in order” and improve governance to avoid this, she adds.

The role of carbon removal

The report points out that the world will also need to use carbon dioxide removal (CDR), which the authors see as having a role on three timescales.

It can already contribute to lowering net emissions, today.

In the medium term, it can contribute to tackling residual emissions from so-called hard-to-abate sectors, such as aviation and heavy industry.

And in the longer term, CDR could potentially be deployed at a large enough scale to bring about a decline in the global mean temperature. They stress that its use should be in addition to rapid decarbonisation of industry, transport, heat and power systems.

CDR refers to the direct removal of CO2 from the atmosphere and its durable storage in geological, terrestrial or ocean reservoirs, or in products. It is different to carbon capture and storage (CSS), which captures CO2 from emissions at their sources, such as a power station, and transfers it into permanent storage. While some CCS methods share features with CDR, they can never result in CO2 removal from the atmosphere.

Some CDR is already being deployed, mainly through reforestation, afforestation and forest management. However, this is very small scale, with removals estimated at 2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) annually. Research and development into more novel technologies is increasing, with methods including sequestering carbon in soil; enhanced weathering, which speeds up the natural weathering of rocks to store CO2; and direct air capture and storage (DACC), where CO2 is extracted from the atmosphere.

There are multiple risks associated with scaling up CDR. These include competition with land for food, protection of tenure and rights, as well as public perception. In addition, the technical, economic and political requirements for large-scale deployment may not materialise in time, UNEP says. Some methods are very expensive, particularly DACC, which UNEP estimates at US$800 per tonne of CO2 removed.

Governments have tended not to specify the extent to which they plan to use CDR to achieve their emission-reduction targets, nor the residual emissions they plan to allow annually when achieving net-zero CO2 and greenhouse gas emission targets, UNEP found. Estimates of the implied levels of land-based removals in long-term strategies and net-zero pledges are 2.1-2.9 GtCO2 of removals per year by 2050, though this is based on an incomplete sample of 53 countries, the report notes.

Politicians need to coordinate the development of CDR, the report states. Dr Oliver Geden, lead author of the chapter on CDR, explains that governments need to clarify their role in national and global climate policy, and develop standards for measuring, reporting and verifying emissions reductions that can eventually be included in national GHG inventories under the UN climate change process.

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist. You can find her on X @Cat_Early76.

Via China Dialogue

Republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY NC ND) licence

(The Conversation) – At the start of 2016, in an article noting some exciting changes in British energy, The Conversation published the following paragraph:

Wind, solar and hydro – the weather-dependent renewables – together generated 14.6% of Great Britain’s electrical energy in 2015, the highest ever annual amount. Wind stormed (literally) past the 2014 record to break through the 10% milestone. Solar more than doubled to 2.5%.

Eight years on, those numbers look tiny. Wind is now up to 29% and solar has doubled again. In 2015, coal still generated a quarter of British electricity, but last year it was down to 1%. Indeed the same author, energy analyst Grant Wilson, recently noted that 2023 was the first ever year when Britain would get more electricity from renewables than fossil fuels.

This roundup of The Conversation’s climate coverage comes from our weekly climate action newsletter. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 30,000+ readers who’ve subscribed.

If you include electricity generated by “biomass” plants (which burn wood pellets, often imported from forests in America) then, as Wilson notes along with his University of Birmingham colleagues Joseph Day and Katarina Pegg, renewables actually first overtook fossil fuels in Britain in 2020.

Channel 4 News: “Can onshore wind revolution lower energy bills in the UK?”

“Trees can of course be regrown, so biomass counts as renewable,” they write. “But the industry has its critics and it’s not globally scalable in the same way as the ‘weather-dependent’ renewables: wind, solar and, to a certain degree, hydro power.”

In other words, if everyone started burning wood pellets for electricity we’d soon run into major problems, whereas one country installing more wind turbines or solar panels doesn’t mean there is less wind or sun left for others. They are effectively infinite resources.

That’s why “weather-dependent” renewables are more appropriate for a global transition, and why 2023 was such a significant milestone year for Britain.

However, this transition may be grinding to a halt. Britain’s electricity decarbonisation is mostly thanks to wind power getting cheaper and cheaper. But what happens if it’s suddenly not cheap anymore?

Phil McNally, an electricity markets researcher at UCL, wrote in September last year about the failure of the latest round of “auctions” to bring forward any new offshore wind projects. “Consequently,” he writes, “the government’s own target of achieving 50 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030 is hanging by a thread, and investor confidence has hit a new low.”

But this isn’t because the technology itself has become more expensive. Indeed, “offshore wind remains one of the cheapest and most suitable technologies available to the UK”. Rather, McNally explains:

The primary factor driving up the cost of delivering a new offshore wind project mirrors a predicament that is currently facing us all – inflation has made things more expensive to buy and money more expensive to borrow. The rate at which prices are rising is starting to fall, but remains significantly above where it was two years ago. For those involved in the construction of an offshore wind farm, this means the cost of both the physical parts (such as the turbines) and the debt (bank loans) has gone up.

This isn’t specific to wind power – prices have gone up for new gas or solar plants too. But given electricity generation is a must, “what truly matters is the relative cost, and offshore wind remains cheap relative to other technologies”.

McNally also notes that the supply chain – the companies that provide everything from turbine blades to installation vessels or trained engineers – has been slow to catch up with demand and can therefore command higher prices.

Given these economic and supply chain issues, he says the UK government should focus on producing a long-term delivery plan for the offshore wind sector that “includes the amount of offshore wind it wishes to procure in each auction, delivering confidence to industry and allowing the development of a healthy supply chain”. In addition:

It could also include standardisation of technology to maximise further cost reductions and accelerate delivery. And it should […] make auction caps more reflective of current costs, so that consumers do not miss out on the cheapest forms of electricity.

The companies that generate Britain’s electricity are doing well, at least. Michael Grubb and Serguey Maximov Gajardo at UCL estimate the total annual revenue to British electricity generating stations increased by £29 billion as a result of the 2022 energy crisis.

“The indications are that these revenues increased by about twice as much as overall generation costs,” they write. While “getting at the numbers is not easy”, their research backs up the widely believed view that firms generating electricity from gas were able to exploit a global increase in gas prices.

Since these companies’ costs shot up following the start of the Ukraine war, it seems no surprise that their prices did too. We estimate their total annual revenue rose by about £13 billion, roughly trebling from the pre-COVID average of £6.3 billion. But the evidence suggests this increase was, in fact, much bigger than the increase in their costs.

Renewable generators also saw profits increase: “We estimate their revenue doubled from £7.7 billion pre-COVID to £15.5 billion in 2022 – yet there is no reason to think their costs increased.”

What happened? A lack of real competition in a market where gas still sets the overall price of electricity, combined with a decline in imports from mainland Europe (which helped regulate prices) and a continent-wide gas shortage, meant “electricity generators in Britain were able to raise prices further above costs”.

And to go back to where we started, Grubb and Gajardo point out:

The real paradox is that all this happened just as non-fossil sources, with stable costs, started to account for more than half of Britain’s electricity (56% if we include nuclear) … For how long can the declining fossil fuel tail continue to wag the dog of Britain’s renewables-based electricity system?

Will de Freitas, Environment + Energy Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Clean Energy Wire ) – Germany has generated more than half of the electricity it used this year with renewable energy for the first time, according to preliminary calculations by the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) and utility association BDEW.

“Renewable energies will have covered almost 52 percent of gross electricity consumption in 2023,” the organisations said in a press release. “This means that the share has risen by five percentage points compared to the same period last year and is above the 50 percent mark for the first time for a full year.”

Germany’s renewables share was 46 percent in 2022. Both a decrease of overall electricity consumption and an increase in absolute renewables production – which rose six percent to an all-time high of 267 TWh – pushed up the share of renewable electricity.

Germany aims to have a renewable electricity share of 80 percent by 2030 and a largely decarbonised power supply by 2035. “The figures show that we are on the right track. Many people once thought that renewables would only account for a single-digit share of electricity consumption, but today we use more electricity from renewables than from conventional sources and have our sights firmly set on 100 percent renewables,” said BDEW head Kerstin Andreae, who called for the removal of bureaucratic hurdles that slow down the renewables roll-out.

CGTN Europe: “Sunny times ahead for German solar industry ”

The country’s environment agency UBA also said the targets were challenging. “According to current estimates, renewable electricity generation must increase to around 600 terawatt hours [by 2030] and thus more than double in order to cover the increasing demand for electrification in the heating and transport sectors,” UBA said.

ZSW and BDEW said the share of renewable electricity was particularly high in July (59%), May (57%) and October and November (55% each). In June, electricity generation from photovoltaics reached a new all-time record of 9.8 terawatt-hours (TWh), while electricity generation from onshore wind energy reached a new record of 113.5 TWh for the year as a whole, they added.

Solar and wind energy contributed around 75 percent of Germany’s renewable electricity, with the remainder covered by biomass, hydropower, and a small share of geothermal plants.

Graph shows renewables share in gross power consumption 1990-2023. Graph: CLEW 2023:

Published under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” .

There are many milestones to pass in the transition from a high to low-carbon sustainable energy system. There is the first hour without coal, or oil, or gas generation (or all of them together) and the point when the last coal, oil or gas power plant (or all of them together) are finally retired.

Another milestone that feels important is the first year when renewables generate more electricity than fossil fuels. For the past three months we have been tracking the data for Great Britain (not Northern Ireland, which shares an electricity grid with the Republic of Ireland) and we believe it is on track to pass this milestone in 2023, but it will be very close.

Using the broadest definition, renewables actually first overtook fossil fuels in the odd, COVID-affected year of 2020 (although not in the subsequent years of 2021 and 2022). However, that includes 5% or so of Britain’s electricity that is generated through “biomass” plants (which burn wood pellets, often imported from forests in America).

Trees can of course be regrown, so biomass counts as renewable. But the industry has its critics and it’s not globally scalable in the same way as the “weather-dependent” renewables: wind, solar and to a certain degree hydro power.

When we use this narrower, weather-dependent definition that is more appropriate for a global transition, then there is a very good chance these renewables will overtake fossil fuels for the first time ever in 2023. Once this milestone has been passed, we also think it is unlikely (though not impossible) that gas and coal will ever again generate more of Britain’s electricity than wind, solar and hydro over a full year.

Whether Britain passes the milestone in 2023 will come down to the final few days of the year (from here on we’ll use “renewables” to refer to the tighter, biomass-excluding definition).

The chart above can be used to track progress and will update with the latest data each day. The lines show the running total of the difference between how much electricity has been generated by renewables and fossil fuels.

When the line is increasing, this shows more renewables than fossil fuels for that period. The horizontal axis shows the day of the year, so, if at any point the line is above the zero axis, that indicates that the year so far has had more renewable than fossil fuel generation. If the red line ends the year above zero, then Britain will have achieved the milestone.

Image by Roman Grac from Pixabay

(One caveat is that we know from the official statistics published later that there are some differences from “missing” and estimates for embedded generation; this typically only accounts for around 1%-2% of the final total.)

It depends on the weather

As we write this, with ten days of data left in 2023, renewables are very slightly ahead (by just over 1000 GWh – about the same level as a peak day of electrical demand). However if they are to stay ahead it will depend on the weather – especially the wind.

The reasoning here is that Britain uses less electricity over the holiday period due to less industrial and commercial demand. As wind power is clean and has become cheaper, it tends to be used first, meaning when demand is low or it is sufficiently windy there is less need to generate electricity with fossil fuels.

There are nuances around this such as where the generation is located, and the amount of electricity imported from other countries, but the general principle of renewables taking market share away from fossil fuels is a factor of Britain’s electrical market.

An important area to also highlight is the continued drop in electrical demand. 2023 is on track to have a lower demand than 2022, which itself was lower than the COVID-impacted year of 2020 (against our predictions) due to record prices. The drop in electrical demand means that additional generation was not needed, much of it inevitably from fossil fuels.

Additional milestone also likely to be passed

However 2023 could be the first year where renewable generation exceeds domestic electricity demand (homes comprise 36% of total electrical demand). This means the annual electricity generated by Britain’s wind turbines, solar panels and hydro resource will now be greater than that consumed over the year by its 29 million households.

The above bar chart demonstrates the trend towards this point since 2009. In the first half of 2023, renewable output was less than domestic electrical demand by 1.5 TWh (1500 GWh), but strong renewable performance since then means it is likely to end the year with total generation in excess of household demand.

If either of the milestones described here do not happen for 2023, then they will almost certainly occur in 2024, during which another 1.7 GW of offshore wind capacity will begin generating and Britain’s last coal-fired power station is scheduled to cease producing electricity altogether.

Grant Wilson, Associate Professor, Energy Systems and Data Group, Birmingham Energy Institute, University of Birmingham; Joseph Day, Postdoctoral Research Assistant, Energy Systems and Data Group, University of Birmingham, and Katarina Pegg, PhD Student, Energy Systems and Data Group, University of Birmingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Tomdispatch.com) – A recent opinion poll rocked the world of the Big Oil lobbyists in their proverbial thousand-dollar suits and alligator shoes. The Pew Research Center found that 37% of Americans now feel that fighting the climate crisis should be the number one priority of President Joe Biden and Congress, and another 34% put it among their highest priorities, even if they didn’t rank it first. Companies like ExxonMobil and countries like Saudi Arabia have tried since the 1990s to gaslight the public into thinking climate change was either a total fantasy or that the burning of coal, natural gas, and petroleum wasn’t causing it. Having lost that battle, the fossil-fuel lobbyists have now fallen back on Plan B. They want to convince you that Big Oil is itself swinging into action in a major way to transition to — yes! — green energy.

The hosting of the recent COP28 climate summit by the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s leading petroleum exporters, exemplified exactly this puffery and, sadly enough, it’s just one instance of this greenwashing world of ours. Everywhere you look, you’ll note other versions, but it certainly was a classic example. Emirati businessman Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber served as president of the Dubai-based 28th Conference of Parties — countries that had signed onto the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. While his green bona fides include his role as chairman of the board of the UAE’s green energy firm Masdar, controversy swirled around him because he’s also the CEO of ADNOC, the UAE’s national petroleum company. Worse yet, he’s committed to expanding the oil and gas production of his postage-stamp-sized nation of one million citizens (and eight million guest workers) in a big-time fashion. He wants ADNOC to increase its daily oil production from its present four million barrels a day to five million by 2027, even though climate scientists stress that global fossil-fuel production must be reduced by 3% annually through 2050 if the world is to avoid the most devastating consequences of climate change.

Embed from Getty Images
COP28 president Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber attends a plenary session during the United Nations climate summit in Dubai on December 13, 2023. Nearly 200 nations meeting in Dubai on December 13 approved a first-ever call for the world to transition away from fossil fuels, the top culprit of climate change behind a planetary crisis. (Photo by Giuseppe CACACE / AFP) (Photo by GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP via Getty Images)

Meanwhile, since COP28 was held in the heart of the petroleum-producing Middle East, it also platformed bad actors like Saudi Arabia, which led the charge to stop the conference from committing to ending the use of fossil fuels by a specific date. The awarding of COP28 to the Emirates by the UNFCCC Secretariat allowed a whole country, perhaps a whole region, to be greenwashed, a genuinely shocking decision that ought to be investigated by the U.N.’s Office of Internal Oversight Services. (And next year, it looks like COP29 will be hosted by another significant oil producer. In other words, the oil countries seem to be on a hot streak!)

Imaginary Algae

Mind you, those Gulf oil states are anything but the only major greenwashers on this planet. After all, the private sector has outdone itself in this arena. A congressional investigation into the major oil companies produced a long report and an appendix that came out last year, including internal corporate emails showing repeated and systemic bad faith on the subject of climate change. ExxonMobil executives, for instance, had publicly committed their company to the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement to keep the increase in the average surface temperature of the earth to no more than 1.5° Centigrade (2.7° Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial era. Although a 1.5-degree increase might sound small, keep in mind that, as a global average, it includes the cold oceans of the higher latitudes, the North and South Poles, and the Himalayas. In already hot climates like South Asia and the Middle East, that means over time it might translate into a stunning 10- to 15-degree increase that could make some places literally unlivable.

Scientists worry that exceeding that level could throw the world’s climate system into full-scale chaos, producing mega-storms, substantial sea level rise, ravaging wildfires, and deadly heat and drought over large parts of the earth’s surface. Still, despite his public commitment to it in 2019, the CEO of ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, asked an oil industry lobbying group to delete a reference to the 2015 Paris climate agreement from the draft of a statement on sustainability it had prepared. That mention, Woods said, “could create a potential commitment to advocate on the Paris agreement goals.” So much for oil company pledges!

In a similar fashion, in 2020, executives of the London-based Shell PLC asked public relations employees to highlight that the company’s vow to reach zero net carbon emissions by 2050 was “a collective ambition for the world,” rather than a “Shell goal or target.” As a company executive admitted all too bluntly, “Shell has no immediate plans to move to a net-zero emissions portfolio over our investment horizon of 10-20 years.” (Oh, and in case you missed this, the profits of the major fossil-fuel outfits have in recent years gone through the roof.)

Buy the Book

Nor is corporate greenwashing simply a matter of public pronouncements by oil company executives. ExxonMobil has run a multi-million-dollar campaign of television and streaming advertising attempting to pull the wool over people’s eyes about what it’s doing. In one instance, it paid the New York Times to run an extended commercial gussied up as if it were a news article, a shameful procedure to which the Times acquiesced. Studies show that most readers miss disclaimers about such pieces actually being paid advertisements. It was entitled, “The Future of Energy? It may come from Where you Least Expect: How scientists are tapping algae and plant waste to fuel a sustainable energy future.” The advertisement was extremely misleading. As Chris Wells, an associate professor of emerging media studies at Boston University’s College of Communication, told BU Today last February, “Exxon is doing a lot of advertising around its investments in algae-based biofuels. But these technologies are not yet viable, and there is a lot of skepticism that they ever will be.”

In fact, about a month after Wells gave that interview, ExxonMobil admitted publicly that it had pulled out of algae biofuels research entirely at the end of 2022, having invested about $29 million a year over 12 years. It spent more millions, however, in advertising to give the public the impression that this paltry investment outweighed the company’s multi-billion-dollar efforts to bring ever more petroleum online.

The environmentalist group Client Earth notes that ExxonMobil spends between $20 billion and $25 billion annually looking for — yes, of course! — new oil fields and is committed to doing so through at least 2025. The company had a net profit of $55.7 billion in 2022. In other words, it’s still devoting nearly half of its annual profits to looking for more petroleum when, of course, it could be using them to launch its transition to sustainable forms of energy. Such — to put it politely — inertia is clearly unwise. New electric vehicle sales in the U.S. soared to about a million this year alone, and EVs will have avoided using 1.8 million barrels of oil in 2023. Better yet, the cost of battery packs for the vehicles fell 14% and is expected to keep heading down, guaranteeing that EVs will be ever more affordable over time. Moreover, in significant parts of the rest of the world, as the New York Times reported recently, electric-powered two- and three-wheeled vehicles are beginning to give the giant oil companies a run for their money. In the decades to come, ExxonMobil’s inflexibility and refusal to innovate will undoubtedly doom the company, but the question remains: In the process, will it doom the rest of us, too?

A Deceptive Greenwashing Marketing Campaign

In another, better world, the courts could punish the oil majors for their greenwashing. That misleading paid ad in the New York Times forms but one cornerstone of a wide-ranging lawsuit against ExxonMobil by the state of Massachusetts, initiated in 2019, which has so far survived that company’s legal challenges. As the office of Attorney General, Andrea Campbell explains, it is “alleging that the company violates Massachusetts law through a deceptive ‘greenwashing’ marketing campaign that misleadingly presents Exxon as a leader in cutting-edge clean energy research and climate action… and… its products as ‘green’ while the company is massively ramping up fossil fuel production and spending only about one-half of 1% of revenues on developing clean energy.” Campbell, an African-American born in Boston, is keenly aware that climate change is an equity issue, since its deleterious effects will initially be felt most strongly among the less privileged. (Of course, given our present Supreme Court, don’t hold your breath on this one.)

In its complaint, the state points to marketing campaigns like those featured on ExxonMobil’s YouTube channel, which still shows an ad produced eight years ago, “Making the World’s Energy go Further,” that, in just 30 seconds, presents a medley of greenwashing’s greatest early hits — algae biofuel, “new technology for capturing CO2 emissions,” and cars twice as efficient in their gas mileage. Algae biofuels, however, have by now bitten the dust; there is no affordable and safe method of capturing and storing carbon dioxide; and electric cars are between “2.6 to 4.8 times more efficient at traveling a mile compared to a gasoline internal combustion engine,” according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. 

The biggest fault in such commercials, however, is that the oil company’s ad makers were trying to convince the public that ExxonMobil was putting major resources into sustainable alternatives.  As the state of Massachusetts points out, in reality “ExxonMobil has ramped up production and reportedly is now the most active driller in the Permian Basin, the shale oil field located in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico that yields low-cost oil in months, rather than the years required for larger offshore projects to begin producing crude… ExxonMobil has invested billions of dollars into the development of massive Canadian oil sands projects, which are among the costliest and most polluting oil extraction projects in the world.”

Carbon Capture and Lake Nyos

An even more dangerous scam than algae biofuels (implausible but not life-threatening) is the idea of carbon capture and storage (CCS). Remind me: Why would we try to store billions of tons of a poisonous gas? On August 21, 1986, subterranean carbon dioxide deposits bubbled up through Lake Nyos in Cameroon, killing nearly 2,000 people, thousands of cattle and other animals, and in the process turned four local villages into graveyards. Some scientists fear similar underground carbon dioxide storage elsewhere could set off earthquakes. And what if such quakes in turn release the gas? Honestly, since I still remember the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster where 11 million gallons of oil, spilled into the waters off Alaska, wrecked hundreds of miles of shoreline and killed unknown numbers of sea creatures and birds, I’d just as soon not have ExxonMobil store carbon dioxide in my neighborhood.

Worse yet, most of the CO2 harvested by oil companies so far has been injected into drill sites to help bring in — yes, you guessed it! — more petroleum. Worse yet, studies have shown that carbon-capture technology itself emits a lot of carbon dioxide, that it can only capture a fraction of the CO2 emitted by fossil fuels, and that just shutting down coal, fossil gas, and petroleum production and substituting wind, solar, hydro, and batteries is far safer, cheaper, and better for the environment. 

Carbon capture is, however, a favorite greenwashing tool of Big Oil, since company executives can pretend that a technological breakthrough somewhere on the horizon justifies continuing to spew out record quantities of CO2 in the present moment. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) wasted billions of taxpayer dollars by including provisions for CCS research and development in Joe Biden’s otherwise admirable Inflation Reduction Act. In the process, he managed to insert a key greenwashing technique into even the most progressive climate legislation ever passed by an industrialized hydrocarbon state.

As for Sultan Al-Jaber, the head of COP28, he let his mask slip in November in a testy exchange with former Irish President Mary Robinson, who had invited him to an online discussion of how women’s lives could be improved if the climate crisis were effectively addressed. When she urged him to act as president of COP28, he exploded: “I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.” He was pushing back against the goal advocated by scientists and many diplomats of quickly phasing hydrocarbons out. He claims to advocate phasing them down, not presumably eliminating them. He added, “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.” Al-Jaber was posturing, since he surely knows that the International Energy Agency has issued just such a roadmap, which does indeed require rapid reductions in fossil fuel use. Oh, and if he has his way, it’s quite conceivable that, somewhere down the road, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates, Dubai, could become too hot to be livable.

“City of Salt,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ IbisPaint, 2023.

Given the plummeting cost of green energy, it’s clear that moving quickly and completely away from fossil fuels will improve the quality of life for people globally while making energy cheaper. In the end, COP28 could only issue an anodyne call for “transitioning away” from fossil fuels. Despite al-Jaber’s globe-straddling greenwashing at the climate summit, however, there is no realistic alternative to phasing fossil fuels not just down but out, and on an accelerated timeline, if our planet’s climate isn’t to turn into a Frankenstein’s monster. After all, 2023 has already proved a unique year for heat — with month after month of record-setting warmth across the globe. And sadly, as fossil-fuel production only continues to increase, that’s just the beginning, not the end, when it comes to potentially broiling this planet.

Admittedly, under the best of circumstances, this transition would be challenging and, according to the United Nations, will certainly require more investments than the countries of the world are now making, but it still appears eminently achievable. As for ExxonMobil and other oil majors, every day they resist investing their obscene profits in truly innovative green energy technology is a day they come closer to future financial ruin. In the meantime, they are, of course, wreaking historically unprecedented harm on the planet, as was all too apparent with the serial climate disasters of 2023, now believed to be the hottest of the last 125,000 years.

Copyright 2023 Juan Cole

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Clean Energy Wire ) – The past decade has seen a sharp drop in prices for clean technologies, which means models identifying efficient pathways to reduce emissions could become subject to change.

Plummeting prices for solar and wind power generation, battery storage or heat pumps could make the energy transition take effect faster than previously expected, according to a report by the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC).

“The fight against global warming remains an enormous political challenge – but at least new, cheaper ways are opening up,” the MCC said. During the past decade, solar power generation has become 87 percent and battery storage 85 percent cheaper, according to the institute.

While scenarios compatible with the goal of limiting global warming to well below 2°C are optimistic regarding the deployment of technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS), they don’t reflect the rates of technological learning and upscaling in renewables in the past decade, the researchers wrote.

There is now evidence “that fossil-free alternatives could become a game changer instead,” according to the MCC.

“Greenhouse gas emissions are higher than ever, the measures taken so far are too weak, but in this politically muddled situation, technological progress provides a ray of hope,” report co-author Jan Minx said.

New decarbonisation models could show that, in the foreseeable future, the global energy transition might be less costly than previously assumed and even help to save costs, Minx added.

The models informing pathways to reduce emissions “would benefit from updated cost assumptions . . . higher resolution on sector coupling, and an overall consideration of demand-side solutions,” the authors concluded.

Published under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)”

Via Clean Energy Wire