100 Hours of Climate News Set the Agenda for 2024

The COP28 climate summit delivered the best result it could. It was progress. It wasn’t nearly enough. Now—again, still—it’s up to the rest of us.

Dec 17, 2023

When COP28 negotiations went into overtime. Photo by @s_guilbeaultTwitter

The COP28 climate summit showed the transformative power and the overwhelming limits of what 195 countries can get done at a United Nations climate summit. The 100 hours of news reports since have laid out an urgent to-do list for the next year.

As UN Climate Secretary Simon Stiell predicted, we’ve seen “reams of analysis of all the initiatives announced here in Dubai”—from the historic, Day One agreement to finally get a global loss and damage fund off the ground, to the pledge to triple renewable energy capacity and double the pace of energy efficiency improvements by 2030.

But the lion’s share of the commentary has gone to passages in the 21-page decision text that talked about “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems” and “reducing both consumption and production of fossil fuels in a just, orderly and equitable manner so as to achieve net zero by, or before, or around 2050 in keeping with the science”.

Those 40 words were a weak victory in the constellation of United Nations legal jargon, and yet a huge achievement nearly 30 years in the making, the first time a consensus document from a UN conference flagged fossil fuels as the root of the global climate emergency.

The text falls far short of the language of fossil fuel phaseout or phasedown that echoed through the sprawling conference facility in Dubai for nearly two weeks.

It includes shout-outs to expensive, deeply questionable technologies like carbon capture and storage, carbon dioxide removal, and small modular nuclear reactors that won’t help countries achieve a looming 2030 emissions reduction target. Whose main function is to give political cover to continued expansion of oil and gas production.

It “recognizes that transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security”, a reference to natural gas that was apparently the price negotiators had to pay to win Russia’s approval for the final consensus text.

And yet. The fossil fuel language—decades overdue, equivocal as it is, with enough weasel words attached to give any fossil fuel project a free pass—is still an historic breakthrough. “What matters is the message this sends out to potential fossil fuel investors,” Climate Home News reporter Joe Lo wrote on social media. “In the previous text, you couldn’t say that governments had agreed to transition away from fossil fuels. Now I think you can.”

But only if countries get serious about the rest of Simon Stiell’s statement. The COP28 decisions, he said, “are a climate action lifeline, not a finish line. Now all governments and businesses need to turn these pledges into real-economy outcomes, without delay.”

So far, there’s little or no evidence that the countries and companies that are throwing fuel on the fire by expanding fossil fuel production are getting with the program. And that tells you what we’ll all be working on in 2024.

100 Hours of Oil and Gas

In the 100 or so hours since COP28 concluded, it’s been a busy time for oil and gas.

The virtual ink was barely dry on the final text when COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber, returning to his main gig as CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), told the Guardian his company would carry on with its record investment in new oil and gas production.

“My approach is very simple: it is that we will continue to act as a responsible, reliable supplier of low-carbon energy, and the world will need the lowest-carbon barrels at the lowest cost,” he said. He added that ADNOC is not “harnessing” all its fossil resources, but will still spend US$150 billion over the next seven years to maintain current production.

And ADNOC is not alone. In the 24 hours after the COP, reports the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative:

• Norway’s oil and gas industry projected increased investment in 2024, after the country’s oil minister said the COP “deal” would change nothing for Norway;

• The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, at least temporarily recovered from its moment of panic during COP28, predicted “healthy growth” in global oil demand in 2024;

• Colossal fossils Petrobras, Chevron, and Shell were betting big on oil development in Brazil;

• The world’s biggest oil refinery went into production;

• A UK company announced a new North Sea gas discovery;

• An offshore gas operator in New Zealand said it had successfully increased production.

But Wait. There’s More.

And we have an update on Monday morning, December 18, with fossil industry newsletter Rigzone spinning the COP outcome as a win for oil and gas and U.S. climate envoy John Kerry pushing back in separate news coverage.

Rigzone unearthed some triumphant language from analyst Ellen R. Wald, president of Transversal Consulting, who bills herself as “the foremost expert on Aramco strategy and motivations.” She notes that “language affirming the long-called for ‘phaseout’ of oil, coal, and gas was rejected, in large part due to objections by oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia,” adding that “even those who pushed for the ‘phaseout’ language would not have been able to be present at the conference in the UAE without hydrocarbons.”

Rigzone also cited a column by Wood Mackenzie Chair Simon Flowers, who listed the transition language in the text among the “key takeaways” from the conference.

“Some countries said the statement did not go far enough. But it is still a significant moment—the first time the governments of the world have agreed a goal to reduce consumption of oil, gas, and coal,” Flowers wrote. “The direction of travel is clear, with the calling out of oil and gas for the first time a step towards phasing out unabated fossil fuels.”

Kerry told the New York Times he wasn’t too concerned about loopholes in the text. “Can they sell their crude today, tomorrow, next week, next year? Sure,” he said. But “they’re going to, like everybody else, have to transition away from fossil fuels.”

A North American Gas Boom

Elsewhere, Alberta was expected to bring more gas-fired electricity online in 2024 than in any other single year, after Premier Danielle Smith slapped a largely unwanted, economically damaging seven-month moratorium on new renewable energy projects in a province that widely supports the energy and climate transition.

And this morning, our friends at Climate & Capital Media are reporting that the Biden administration may soon approve a massive, $13-billion liquefied natural gas export project in Louisiana that would equal about one-quarter of the world’s current LNG supply. It’s one of 25 U.S. LNG terminals that are “in construction or queuing for approval,” Climate & Capital Founder and Editor Peter McKillop writes in an email commentary.

If all of those deals get done, “that's more climate-warming pollution than 681 new coal-fired power plants,” McKillop states. “And that number is misleading. It does not include emissions from drilling and hydraulic fracturing, pipelines, gas leaks, processing, or the eventual burning of gas in homes and businesses. If these upstream and downstream contributions are accounted for, the actual climate footprint of LNG would be several times higher.”

The long tail of those announcements showed up in the desperation and urgency that we heard once again from developing country delegates at COP28. They were looking for adequate funding and long-overdue financial system reform to confront all the dimensions of the climate emergency: the emission reduction and energy transition projects they want to undertake, the climate adaptation work they need right now, and the loss and damage compensation that is finally, but so very haltingly, beginning to take shape.

Just like the fossil fuel announcements since the COP, those impacts haven’t paused in the 100 hours since exhausted delegates left Dubai. Euronews says hundreds are dead and millions have been affected by “raging floods” in Kenya that have been going on since October and have “washed away entire villages”. An attribution study found that climate change doubled the storms’ intensity.

The Year We Turned the Corner

The grindingly slow pace and process-driven formality of United Nations negotiations guarantee that the COP will never deliver the climate breakthroughs we need on its own.

But if you think of the COP28 decision as just one front in a multi-pronged battle—as two weeks of our lives that we’ll never get back out of a 12-month-long fight—this may still have been the year we turned the corner on the climate emergency.

Time will tell, and any prediction is perfectly capable of being wrong. I could just as easily give you a dozen reasons that 2023 may have seen climate change spiral permanently out of control—because that balance between hope and futility, between breakthrough and defeat, is the moment we’re in.

But amid the record heat, killer floods, multi-year famines, devastating wildfires and smoke alerts, it’s even more important to hang on to the powerful glimmers of hope and progress, then build them into something bigger, faster, better in 2024.

Here are just a dozen of the stories we’ve been following.

1. With all its limitations and caveats, the fossil fuel transition text in the COP28 decision still tops the list, because weak language in an international forum can still land powerfully in the real world.

After countries adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015—an outcome that was seen as weak at the time, but historic in retrospect—the head of the European Association for Coal and Lignite warned his members they weren’t off the hook. “The words and legal basis no longer matter,” Brian Ricketts wrote. “We will be hated and vilified, in the same way that the slave traders were once hated and vilified.”

It’ll take a while for the COP28 language to filter through to international agencies and investors, but as OPEC well knows, that moment has just arrived for oil and gas.

2. The renewable energy and energy efficiency pledge, endorsed by more than 110 countries and then adopted in the final COP28 declaration, is the other huge signal to international investors. It’s been eclipsed by the fossil fuel language, but it sets what UN negotiators like to call the “direction of travel” for global energy systems.

3. The loss and damage agreement is a long-overdue milestone for vulnerable countries, and for climate justice. It’s still vastly underfinanced, like all the other international funds and mechanisms for mobilizing dollars behind climate solutions. The push to introduce new financing mechanisms and redirect fossil fuel subsidies will be one of the most urgent stories we’ll all want to follow in 2024.

4. Earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change listed renewable energy, energy efficiency, and methane reductions in oil and gas as the quickest, cheapest ways to get the biggest emission reductions by 2030. COP28 delegates took action on all three.

Emissions About to Peak

5. Global carbon pollution is finally about to peak, with the Climate Analytics think tank laying 70% odds that 2024 will be the “crucial inflection point” when emissions begin to fall—as long as clean technology growth trends continue and countries follow through on their pledges to cut methane emissions. “Reaching peak global greenhouse gas emissions—the point at which emissions stop growing and start falling—will be a crucial inflection point for the world,” Climate Analytics wrote.

6. Last month, veteran climate-watcher Lauri Myllyvirta predicted that emissions in China will fall next year before going into a permanent, structural decline. It’s huge news—because China is currently the world’s biggest climate polluter, and because that reality has been used as an excuse for countries like Canada to delay their own emission reductions. “Given the low-carbon electricity capacity already installed this year—and the outlook for hydropower generation—a drop in power-sector emissions in 2024 is essentially locked in, barring a major acceleration in electricity demand growth,” Myllyvirta wrote.

7. Global fossil fuel consumption is about to tank. The International Energy Agency is projecting a “moment of truth” for oil and gas, after determining that global demand will start to fall before 2030. None of that will be enough to keep dangerous global warming under control. But it’s a cornerstone to build on, and we know that modelling agencies everywhere—including the IEA—routinely, reflexively underestimate how quickly renewable energy costs will fall or deployment will accelerate.

8. Astonishingly, after decades of falling short on every climate pledge it made, it looks like Canada is on track to meet or exceed its emission reduction goal for 2026, and getting closer to its 2030 target—as long as governments keep their promises. But “to meet Canada’s climate commitments, planned policies from all orders of government will have to be implemented very quickly and effectively,” the Canadian Climate Institute writes. “Any major delays in implementation, or weakening of policy design, will put Canada further off track.”

9. The long wait for climate regulations in Canada is finally coming to an end. Ottawa has finally announced a 75% methane reduction target for 2030 in tandem with the United States, unveiled an oil and gas emissions cap that will mandate a 35% reduction this decade, and is expected to publish its electric vehicle sales regulations Tuesday. With 149 items on the to-do list in the federal Emissions Reduction Plan, Ottawa says 78% “are actively being implemented”.

10. Climate attribution science is getting ever more sophisticated and precise. We saw that in May, with a peer-reviewed study that named the 88 fossil fuel and cement companies that shared responsibility for 37% of the wildfire losses in the western regions of Canada and the U.S.—not 36%, not 38%, but precisely 37%—over the last 35 years.

11. Better attribution studies can lead to better policy, and they definitely hold out the hope of better lawsuits. One of those is back on the docket, after a Federal Court of Appeals panel ruled unanimously last week that a youth climate lawsuit against Canadian climate policy can go to trial.

In an exquisitely-crafted judgement, Justice Donald J. Rennie emphasized that the law can’t change too quickly without disrupting society—but it has to evolve as times change. “Climate change’s current and potential effects are widespread and grave, they include loss of land and culture, food insecurity, injury and death,” he wrote. “If these do not constitute special circumstances, it is hard to conceive that any such circumstances could ever exist; however this remains to be determined by the trial judge.”

12. Climate pollution from the world’s mammoth military establishment is finally beginning to receive more attention. Military spending absorbs 30 times more money each year than climate finance, routine operations outside active war zones account for 5.5% of global emissions, and war connects directly and brutally to gender-based violence. But reporting military emissions is voluntary under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), so most countries decline to share the data, citing strategic interests. Correcting that gap will be a years-long fight, but that’s all the more reason to start pushing it toward the centre of the global climate agenda.

What’s Next?

It all adds up to a year of hard-fought, badly-needed breakthroughs that still don’t match the scale of the climate emergency, and aren’t enough on their own to curtail a massive fossil fuel buildout that is still unfolding before our eyes.

But each of these wins gives us a powerful pathway to keep on pushing—wherever we live, wherever we work, with whatever levers we have at our disposal—to speed up the shift off carbon and mobilize the trillions in financing that will get the job done.

All of this still means, as some of us have been insisting for years, that the last chapters of this story have yet to be written, and we still have the power to write them. That phrase is getting old. Time is running short. But it’s still true that even the gains we’ve made in the last two or three years were unimaginable until they happened.

That every 1/10 of a degree of global warming is worth the fight.

And that we’re only guaranteed to lose this battle of our lifetimes if we convince ourselves it’s already lost.

Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix, The Energy Mix Weekender, and our newest weekly e-digest, Cities & Communities.