A day after nations agreed at COP 28 to a nonbinding transition away from fossil fuels, the UAE Consensus is being called a devastating failure for the planet and a dream come true for fossil fuel interests, The Guardian reports today.
“The lack of an agreement to phase out fossil fuels was devastating,” said Prof Michael Mann, a climatologist and geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania in the US. “To ‘transition away from fossil fuels’ was weak tea at best. It’s like promising your doctor that you will ‘transition away from doughnuts’ after being diagnosed with diabetes.”
Mann said we need to “mend it not end it” in regard to the failure of nearly 30 years of negotiations at UNFCCC COPs to tackle global warming, saying they remain our sole method to negotiate global climate solutions. “But the failure of Cop28 to achieve any meaningful progress at a time when our window of opportunity to limit warming below catastrophic levels is closing, is a source of great concern.”
Among some of the comments:
Prof Martin Siegert, a polar scientist and deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Exeter, said: “The science is perfectly clear. Cop28, by not making a clear declaration to stop fossil fuel burning is a tragedy for the planet and our future. The world is heating faster and more powerfully than the Cop response to deal with it.”
Prof Mike Berners-Lee, an expert on carbon footprinting at Lancaster University, said: “Cop28 is the fossil fuel industry’s dream outcome, because it looks like progress, but it isn’t.”
Dr Elena Cantarello, a senior lecturer in sustainability science at Bournemouth University, UK, said: “It is hugely disappointing to see how a very small number of countries have been able to put short-term national interests ahead of the future of people and nature.”
Dr James Dyke, an associate professor in earth system dynamics at the University of Exeter, said: “Cop28 needed to deliver an unambiguous statement. While the agreement’s call for the need to transition away from fossil fuels is welcome, it has numerous caveats and loopholes that risks rendering it meaningless.
“That this deal has been hailed as a landmark is more a measure of previous failures than any step change when it comes to the increasingly urgent need to rapidly stop burning coal, oil and gas.”