Fossil Phaseout Language Has Oil Lobby in Panic Mode
COP28 may yet call for a fossil fuel phaseout. Even if it doesn’t, the die is cast.
It’s Week 2 of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, and the oil and gas lobby is hitting the panic button.
For months leading into this round of annual negotiations, calls for a phaseout of all fossil fuels have been sounding through the endless marathon of official meetings, reports, analyses, and advocacy that precede any COP. Through much of that time, Sultan Al Jaber, the oil and gas CEO controversially appointed by the United Arab Emirates to lead this year’s make-or-break climate talks, has fought hard to sustain one of the industry’s favourite talking points: that there’s any realistic way to phase down greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels without phasing down production, in time to get the climate emergency under control.
But it isn’t working. Not yet. And, quite possibly, not for much longer.
At last count, more than 100 of the 195 countries attending the conference, including the 27-member European Union and the 39-member Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), had signed on to the call for a fossil fuel phaseout. And remarkably, as of early Sunday morning in the Dubai time zone, that language had not yet been removed from the draft text of the final COP28 declaration.
Don’t Celebrate Yet
There are several days of hours-long, high-stakes negotiations ahead before we’ll know if there’s anything immediate to celebrate here.
Apart from the diplomatic language in the meeting rooms and the sometimes stunningly undiplomatic moments when the mask slips, agreements and disagreements at a COP play out in successive drafts of the decision text. As we’ve explained from time to time on The Energy Mix, a single version of the draft is meant to include and consolidate all the various, often mutually contradictory options under discussion.
So right now, if the next few days go very well, this year’s final COP declaration could call for a phaseout or phasedown of oil, gas, and coal, as well as a tripling of global renewable energy capacity and doubling of energy efficiency activity by 2030. But there’s also a “no text” option for each of these essential, cornerstone climate policies. If the COP fails to pronounce itself, that will mean perpetual bad actors like Saudi Arabia managed to block consensus on measures that the majority of countries want, and every citizen of Earth needs right now.
Still, at the glacial pace of COP negotiations, it’s an amazing advance that delegates are even having this conversation, with just three days left before the COP goes into overtime (and they almost always do).
For the oil and gas lobby, this is way too close for comfort.
The Empire Fights Back
On Friday, Bloomberg and Reuters revealed leaked letters from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil cartel to its 13 members and 10 allied nations, warning with “utmost urgency” that “pressure against fossil fuels may reach a tipping point with irreversible consequences.” The letters urged petro-states to “proactively reject any text or formula that targets energy, ie fossil fuels, rather than emissions.”
The missive from Kuwaiti oil executive and OPEC Secretary General Haitham al-Ghais was reminiscent of a warning from Brian Ricketts, secretary-general of the European Association for Coal and Lignite (Euracoal), in the hours after the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015. Despite what coal execs might have seen as a mild conference outcome, the industry “will be hated and vilified, in the same way that the slave traders were once hated and vilified,” Ricketts assured his members.
Eight years later, Al-Ghais sent identical copies of his own letter “to the 13 members of OPEC, which include Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Nigeria,” the Guardian writes. “These countries own 80% of global oil reserves and produced about 40% of the world’s oil over the last decade.”
The OPEC letters “show that fossil fuel interests are starting to realize that the writing is on the wall for dirty energy,” said Power Shift Africa Founding Director Mohamed Adow. “The reality is, if the world is going to save itself, it cannot be held back by a small band of countries that control the world’s oil supply.”
But that small band of petro-states was never going to make it easy. Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman arrived in Dubai Friday and was seen strolling the COP28 grounds with his UAE counterpart, Energy Minister Suhail Al Mazrouei, Bloomberg reports. Bin Salman had previously declared he would “absolutely not” agree to fossil phaseout or phasedown language in the final text.
The Fossil Lobby Gets Desperate
In a sure sign of desperation, Saudi Arabia is also pushing the bizarrely evidence-free line that renewable energies like wind and solar carry the same environmental footprint as the fossil fuels that have caused the lion’s share of human-generated global heating. The “pitch from the world’s biggest oil player” coincides with the kingdom’s “broader arguments that expensive, largely unproven methods of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and oceans are an essential part of the strategy for countering climate change,” Politico writes.
Based on industry figures, those methods may have successfully captured 0.05% of global carbon emissions since 1959, and the actual total is likely less than 0.01%, according to a chart posted on LinkedIn by climate analyst Ketan Joshi. That’s because industry boosters only ever talk about the theoretical capacity of the carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities that companies have managed to bring online, never the actual performance of a technology that isn’t nearly ready for prime time.
But, for goodness’ sake, please—stop trying to derail us with facts and data! Alongside the Saudis, “the countries that made their positions extremely clear on this are in particular Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Turkey,” Oil Change International campaigner Romain Ioualalen told a media scrum in Dubai earlier in the week.
Welcome to the Bare Knuckle Round
The end of this year’s story—the “endgame”, in COP-talk—will play out over the next several days. Negotiations are scheduled to end Tuesday, everyone’s about to place their side bets on how many hours or days they’ll run over, but Al Jaber is still said to be pushing for a timely finish. Not least, according to one news report, because the sprawling conference facility in Dubai is scheduled to host a big home show beginning December 15.
Because, y’know, crisis or no crisis, the show must go on.
But this tortuous rhythm is actually the way COP negotiations are meant to go. In the first week, while the spotlight shines on a flurry of high-profile announcements and calls to action, negotiators meet behind closed doors to try to hammer out the issues, clarify areas of agreement and disagreement, and narrow down the range of options for the final declaration. In the second week, ministers arrive to finalize a consensus text that expresses the best deal they think is politically possible. Throughout, the COP Presidency, in this case led by the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, is meant to be a relentless advocate for the process, not for any one country’s interests, twisting arms for the most ambitious deal the parties can agree to.
Despite an early, landmark decision on loss and damage on the first day of the COP, and the Presidency’s loudly-touted pitch for voluntary methane cuts from 50 fossil fuel companies, the word so far is that the first week didn’t go especially well. Crucial technical discussions on emission reductions, climate adaptation, and long-term goals and financing got bogged down, amid suspicions that some countries (cough, cough, Saudi Arabia) were planting diplomatic “landmines” in the draft text that would make final negotiations even more contentious and solid agreements less likely. That left it for the ministers to sort through the debris and come up with a deal worth agreeing to.
On Friday, Al Jaber appointed teams of “ministerial pairings” to try to advance the discussion in key areas, including Canadian Environment and Climate Minister Steven Guilbeault and his Egyptian counterpart on climate finance. The teams were instructed to report back “successful outcomes for all technical matters” by Saturday at 3 PM local time, Earth Negotiations Bulletin reports.
In a media briefing a couple of hours after that deadline, observers on the ground in Dubai reported “strong surround sound” for the renewable energy and energy efficiency pledge and a lot of pressure on Al Jaber to deliver a meaningful conference outcome despite his widely-perceived conflict of interest.
The COP President “has made sure some progressive options are on the table,” one of the observers said. Now, “he will need to continue to ensure that there’s scope for an ambitious outcome,” and that watered-down language on the phaseout “isn’t just passed through” into the final text. The gold standard to watch for: A COP decision that calls for a fossil fuel phaseout in line with a 1.5°C climate target, based on best available science.
It All Comes Back to Finance
But this is where the process gets (even more) complicated.
At last year’s COP, the European Union tried and failed to land an immediate agreement on climate finance in exchange for a pledge to peak greenhouse gas emissions before 2025 and phase down oil and gas as well as coal. The tension between those goals—the need for the world’s richest countries to deliver the trillions of dollars that developing countries will need to set aside fossil fuels and jump-start the clean economy—is still going on, and the media briefers Saturday reported only limited progress.
“Finance is important for the energy package as a whole, not only for the fossil fuel phaseout,” one of the briefers explained. But negotiators haven’t made much progress linking the two issues, and the conference has only mobilized $60 billion so far for climate finance—a lot of money in everyday terms, but just a drop in the bucket compared to what’s needed to help the “more vulnerable producers” break away from oil, gas, and coal.
On a pre-COP briefing hosted by Climate Action Network-Canada, Power Shift Africa’s Mohamed Adow explained why that matters. Africa has vast renewable energy resources and supplies of strategic minerals, he said. “But we need investment from rich countries that claim to be climate leaders,” beginning with a doubling in the funds available to adapt to the climate devastation the continent is already experiencing.
“We cannot deliver climate ambition without financial support,” he added, and that disconnect is something the fossil industry can and does exploit in its push into Africa.
Developing country leaders have been putting forward some bold strategies on international climate finance. At last year’s COP, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley introduced the Bridgetown Initiative, a bid to unlock trillions of dollars in climate investment and correct a massive disparity in borrowing costs—14% interest for developing nations, compared to between 1 and 4% for wealthy countries—that translates into a spiralling debt crisis for vulnerable countries hit by climate disasters.
This year, Kenyan President William Ruto is pointing to new investment in solar and wind projects in eight countries “as the definitive sign that the rest of the world and—more importantly—investors no longer see Africa solely as a region of ‘disease, poverty, conflict’,” Bloomberg reports. “I’m finally persuaded that Africa has a different narrative, that the world is beginning to see Africa as an opportunity, and not as a problematic continent,” he said.
It's Still a Win
It’s hard to see how those shifts will translate over just a few days of exhausting, adrenalized, over-caffeinated negotiations into the dollars developing countries have been asking for, and entitled to, for decades. And without cash on the table, it may be that much harder to get the strong language on the fossil fuel phaseout that many of the rich countries say they want.
But even if that language gets watered down or dropped out of the text this year, the determined call for a fossil fuel phaseout isn’t going to disappear. It’ll come back, then come back again, with increasing urgency each year, until it happens.
In a cascading, global climate emergency, it shouldn’t be nearly so hard to get this done. But believe it or not, what we’re seeing right here, right now is still massive progress.
“For 25 years oil, gas, and coal were the fossilized elephant in this room, going unmentioned in formal decision texts,” said David Tong, global industry campaign manager at Oil Change International. “Over the last two years there's been incredible momentum—the outcomes we're seeking would have been unthinkable three years ago."
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.
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I have been desperately trying to get someones attention!
If wind could be made to produce base load power, every community in the world could build their own power plants and electricity prices would be controlled by the local communities.
This would result in all electricity prices being controlled by local communities. The result would be a 90% drop in electricity prices.
In addition all high voltage transmission would stop.
Grid failure issues would become nonexistent.
This build would radically effect the world because of the effects these low prices would cause. You could drive your brand new Tesla for about five dollars a week.
But I never get anyone even asking me how to do this?
Why?
For years we've heard it said that it would be foolish to trust those most responsible for the climate crisis to fix the climate crisis. That sounds more true all the time.