At the conclusion of the COP28 United Nations climate change conference in Dubai on Wednesday, news accounts and statements from the officials overseeing the confab hailed a breakthrough success: For the first time, an international agreement on climate change called for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems.”
Global policy in the next few decades will determine whether humanity will breach the threshold of catastrophic climate change.
COP28 “announced the global and irreversible trend toward a green, low-carbon transition,” said Zhao Yingming, China’s vice minister of ecology and environment.
Climate activists in the United Arab Emirates had been pushing hard toward this outcome with protests and even acts of civil disobedience.
Their success was the culmination of yearslong effort. Last year, at COP27 in Sharm-el Sheikh, Egypt, it was considered a major breakthrough when the United States finally embraced language that called for a “phase down” of “unabated” fossil fuels. (“Unabated” means without technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions, known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS.) This year, in a state flush with oil money, they managed to get much stronger wording.
But that’s all it is: words. Global policy in the next few decades will determine whether humanity will breach the threshold of catastrophic climate change — which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says is 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming over pre-industrial levels — and will be a settled question well before the phaseout of fossil fuels is complete.
The world has already experienced 1.2℃ of warming, having just endured the hottest year on record and a cascade of climate change-related extreme weather events. The IPCC calculates that to stay below 1.5℃ of warming, global greenhouse gas emissions must drop 43% by 2030, 60% by 2035 and reach net-zero by 2050.
We’re nowhere near that trajectory — and…
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