COP28 started with high hopes, but is now bogged down over a word. Will it be a “phase down” of Fossil Foolishness, per the weakening OPEC and Russia, or a “phase out” per the rest of the world? IOW, do we value money or life more? The word doesn’t really matter, first because the two camps are going their separate ways regardless of any COP resolutions, and second because it turns out that OPEC and Russia are rapidly losing their market power.
The high hopes came from early agreements on a Loss and Damage Fund for the countries worst impacted by Global Warming, and an agreement to reduce methane leaks by 30%, enforced by satellite sensing systems. Neither is adequate to the much larger needs, but both signal changes in global attitudes by the public and by those governments that actually respond to public opinion.
The Guardian: $700m pledged to loss and damage fund at Cop28 covers less than 0.2% needed
In a historic move, the loss and damage fund was agreed at the opening plenary of the first day the Cop28 summit in Dubai – a hard-won victory by developing countries that they hoped would signal a commitment by the developed, polluting nations to finally provide financial support for some of the destruction already under way.
Money offered so far falls far short of estimated $400bn in losses developing countries face each year
Baby steps, after decades of just lying there helpless and then tentatively crawling around.
COP28 is making headlines. Here’s why the focus on methane matters
That’s where the Global Methane Pledge comes in, promising a 30 percent cut in humans’ emissions by 2030. The pledge was spearheaded in 2021 by the United States and the European Union, and so far, 150 nations have signed on. Most recently, Turkmenistan, which has sizable methane emissions, joined. So there’s hope: If everyone were to follow suit, it really is possible to cut global methane emissions deeply, bringing us much closer to meeting the Paris Agreement’s goals, Nisbet argues in a Dec. 8 editorial in Science.
Still, many of the world’s biggest methane emitters, including China, India, Russia, Iran and South Africa, have not signed on to the pledge. China’s methane comes in large part from its coal combustion; India’s, from coal as well as waste heaps and biomass fires. And China alone currently releases an estimated 65 million metric tons of methane per year, more than double that of the United States or India, the next two biggest emitters.
We will come back to these topics in future reports, as we see how these initiatives and others progress.
The big deal, as I see it, is that the old OPEC playbook is dead. OPEC tried to goose prices this year by cutting production, and failed dismally.
The US became the world’s leading oil and gas producer in 2018. A lot of people who don’t understand market power are complaining at President Biden about continuing that, as though we would be better off with Saudi Arabia and Russia owning the market. OPEC can still affect official COP agreement texts, but not market prices, and most importantly, not the drive to decarbonize. All the rest of the world is in agreement on what needs to be done, and is doing much of it. Not enough yet, but that is down to people in government who lack sufficient imagination to follow where the markets are leading us, at exponentially growing rates.
Cop28 live: talks expected to extend beyond official summit end after ‘insufficient’ draft text
Yesterday saw strong opposition from the Pacific states, the EU and many others over the failure of the text to include language on phasing out of fossil fuels, something that is crucial for keeping 1.5C alive.
Cedric Schuster, of Samoa, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, said: “We will not sign our death certificate. We cannot sign on to text that does not have strong commitments on phasing out fossil fuels.”
After Fast Start, COP28 Climate Talks in Murky Middle Between Hope, Roadblocks
Discussions have been focused on the so-called Global Stocktake — a status of where nations are with meeting their climate goals to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with 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 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.”
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.
Maybe. Or maybe we should say, not just yet.
Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance COP28 call to action
As members and friends of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance (BOGA), we stand united in our commitment to align oil and gas production with the objectives of the Paris Agreement, including limiting temperature increases to a maximum of 1.5°C. We are here with a clear mandate, to secure an agreement to phase out all fossil fuels at COP28.
We’ll be back.
‘Stunned’: OPEC urges members to block action on fossil fuels at COP28
French Energy Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher said Saturday she was "stunned" after the oil cartel OPEC urged its members to thwart any deal targeting fossil fuels at the COP28 conference.
In the letter sent Wednesday, [OPEC Secretary General Haitham Al] Ghais urged the group to "proactively reject any text or formula that targets energy i.e. fossil fuels rather than emissions".
The letter urged OPEC+ members and allies to reject any mention of fossil fuels in the final summit deal, warning that "undue and disproportionate pressure against fossil fuels may reach a tipping point".
I wish there were words to express how stupid that is, as if there were a distinction between emissions and their cause.
It was the first time OPEC's secretariat has intervened in the UN climate talks with such a letter, Alden Meyer, an analyst at the E3G think-tank, told Reuters. "It indicates a whiff of panic," he said.
By insisting on focusing on emissions rather than fossil fuels, the two countries appeared to be leaning on the promise of expensive carbon capture technology, which the UN climate science panel says cannot take the place of reducing fossil fuel use worldwide.
COP28: More than 110 nations commit to tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030
More than 110 countries committed Saturday to triple renewable energy capacity worldwide by 2030 and double the annual rate of energy efficiency improvements. The deal came as world leaders gathered for a third day of the COP28 summit in Dubai.
Renewable power growth is surging – driven by the global energy crisis and policy momentum
Solar PV is today the only renewable energy technology on track with the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE) Scenario. Wind, hydro, geothermal, solar thermal and ocean energy use needs to expand significantly faster in order to get on track. Non-bioenergy renewables need to increase their share of total energy supply from close to 5% today to approximately 17% by 2030 in the NZE Scenario. To achieve this, annual renewable energy use must increase at an average rate of about 13% during 2023-2030, twice as much as the average over the past 5 years.
A pledge to triple renewables is close enough for government work. Now, how about letting the markets loose to make it so?
UN Environmental Programme: State of Finance for Nature 2023
Nature is the beating heart of human wellbeing and prosperity. Yet the triple planetary crisis – the crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss and pollution and waste – is causing nature to atrophy, and with it our chances of ending poverty, hunger and inequity through the sustainable development goals. Nations have recognized this. In response, they have built an interlocking framework of multilateral agreements: from the Paris Agreement to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to land degradation neutrality targets and more.
Executive Summary
The State of Finance for Nature (SFN) annual report series tracks finance flows to nature-based solutions (NbS) and compares them to the finance needed to maximise the potential of NbS to help tackle climate, biodiversity and degradation challenges. For the first time, this edition estimates the scale of nature-negative finance flows from both public and private sector sources globally.
The figure is daunting – almost US$7 trillion per year - and is likely to be an underestimate given it includes only direct impacts. Private finance flows that have a direct negative impact on nature are US$5 trillion, which is 140 times larger than private investments into NbS.
On the public side, environmentally harmful subsidies have increased 55 per cent to US$1.7 trillion since the last report, despite government commitments and driven by fiscal support for fossil fuel consumption. The combined impact of public and private nature negative finance flows is enormously destructive and undermines potential increases in finance for NbS. However, this misalignment represents a massive opportunity to turnaround private and public finance flows to align them with Rio Convention targets.
Meanwhile, NbS remain severely underfunded. Current finance flows to NbS are US$200 billion, only a third of levels needed to reach climate, biodiversity and land degradation targets by 2030. Governments continue to provide most funding for NbS (82 per cent). Despite the irrefutable need for action and growing commitments, e.g. zero-deforestation pledges in the agri-food sector, NbS finance has increased only 11 per cent since the 2022 edition.
Climate Restoration: The Only Future That Will Sustain the Human Race, by Peter Fiekowsky, Carole Douglis, 2022
The Paris Accords, widely accepted as the key to solving today’s climate crisis, set a goal of zero net carbon emissions by 2050. But that’s not good enough. The only way to guarantee a livable future is climate restoration, which can reduce greenhouse gases to historic levels. Scientist and entrepreneur Peter Fiekowsky explains the technology and maps a practical path that will let humankind survive and thrive. As Fiekowsky explains in Climate Restoration, this will require removing a trillion tons of excess CO2 from the atmosphere. [Actually, a teraton of C, which is 3 teratons of CO2.] The good news is that this task, while enormous and technically challenging, is eminently feasible. Scientists and engineers have developed four major technologies for greenhouse gas removal and storage: Ocean iron fertilization; synthetic limestone manufacture; seaweed permaculture; and methane oxidation. Fiekowsky shows that these technologies are safe and practical—and, even more remarkable, that they require little if any government funding, since they can be financed largely through existing markets. For these reasons, they have enormous promise as vehicles for achieving climate restoration.
Actually, there are more. Trees, for example. We’ll keep coming back to real carbon capture.
US Opts Out of Dutch Plan to End Fossil Fuel Subsidies at COP28
Climate activists likely to be concerned by another fossil fuel-reliant country taking over summit presidency
Under UN rules it was eastern Europe’s turn to take over the rotating presidency but the groups need to unanimously decide on the host. Russia had blocked EU countries and Azerbaijan and Armenia were blocking each other’s bids.
As the climate summit goes into its final days, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) will on Sunday unveil its long-awaited intervention on the future of agriculture in a 1.5C world.
But the FAO roadmap is expected to be short on detail and long on aspiration. The launch is likely to set out some of the main areas of work but leave the big issues for the future, with the promise of laying out more detail at Cop29 and Cop30.
COP 28 press releases and media advisories
Official and third-party.
Global Warming Bibliography Coming
I have recently found well over a hundred books on Global Warming causes and solutions, and dozens promoting denialism, that I can help you sort through in future Diaries.
Note
Mokurai spent 17 years as a Global High-Tech Market analyst. He has since been a tech writer, an advocate for One Laptop Per Child and for Doug Engelbart’s vision of Augmenting Human Intellect, and, of course, a Kossack.
Bob Dylan - The Times They Are A-Changin' (Official Audio)