After 28 years, the elephant has been named

A few years ago I clicked on a news headline and found that it wasn’t an article, it was a live news blog. The top line informed me that the chancellor had delivered his budget, and they would have “instant reax soon.” Even the word ‘reactions’ was apparently too long for our culture of immediacy.

It occurred to me at that point that what I valued in a commentator was not an instant reaction, but a considered opinion. And that’s why I’m writing about the end of COP28 at the end of the week. As the delegates return home and the conference is packed down, what has been achieved? What difference will it make?

I’ll be honest: I expected very little from this particular conference, and I know I was not alone in that. Hosted in a petrostate and chaired by the CEO of an oil company, I think the low expectations were justified. That makes it all the more surprising that COP28 delivered a significant breakthrough. For the first time, fossil fuels has been specifically mentioned.

Of course, history will consider it absurd that this is considered a breakthrough moment! Burning fossil fuels is the primary cause of climate change. Moving past them should have been the first action point at the end of COP1. The fact that’s it’s taken 28 years to acknowledge the basic cause of the problem is extraordinary, and shows just how powerful petroculture is.

That power was on show again this year. According to the campaign coalition Kick Big Polluters Out, there were 2,456 registered oil and gas attendees at the COP. Only two countries had bigger delegations – the hosts UAE, and Brazil. Fossil fuels have a bigger reach at the talks than almost anyone else, with representatives in more meetings, creating more opportunities to offer an opinion. By contrast, the combined delegations of the ten most vulnerable countries adds up to 1,509. Indigenous people have 316 representatives.

Neither are the fossil fuel lobbyists shy in using this voice. A leak from OPEC revealed that they were pressuring member governments to “proactively reject any text or formula that targets energy i.e. fossil fuels rather than emissions.”

This has been the big strategy for nearly three decades now. Keep talking about emissions, without ever specifying their biggest source. Keep the words ‘fossil fuels’ out of the discussion, keep it abstract, keep the oil and gas flowing and the profits stacking up.

That strategy ends with COP28, despite the best efforts of all those delegates. There were various ways it could be phrased, with different degrees of commitment, and we won’t get bogged down in the nuances of the text. In the end, the exact sentence in the document is this: nations are invited to “contribute to” a list of goals, one of which is “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner”.

There. Was that so difficult?

It is of course carefully unspecific. Contributing to something is not the same as doing it, let alone completing the task. Just ask my kids what they consider to be a fair contribution to household chores. Loopholes abound throughout the text, from “unabated” coal to “inefficient” subsidies. But it’s a start.

“We are finally naming the elephant in the room,” says Mohamed Adow of Power Shift Africa. “The genie is never going back into the bottle and future COPs will only turn the screws even more on dirty energy.” Adow is a veteran of the COP process and I read his perspective on outcomes each year. It’s usually very negative, and this is an exception. “This result would have been unheard of two years ago,” he notes, “especially at a COP meeting in a petrostate. It shows that even oil and gas producers can see we’re heading for a fossil free world.”

Evidence of these tightening screws can already be seen in the countries joining various alliances and coalitions. Among the most ambitious is the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, created by Costa Rica and Denmark and committed to phasing out fossil fuels entirely. I’ve written about them before, and this year they were joined by three more countries: Samoa, Spain and Kenya. These dozen countries are getting on with the obvious solution that everyone else is resisting, and won’t be waiting for global consensus. Wales is among these climate leaders, by the way, while the overall UK government is not. Washington State is leading the line for for the USA in similar fashion.

There are other forms of climate leadership that are gradually building in strength. A growing list of countries support a fossil fuels non-proliferation treaty. There is considerable progress on moving beyond coal, and increasing renewable energy.

Climate change will not be halted without the biggest emitters, so it was important to see the US and China working together as they had pledged to do in their bilateral talks earlier this year. Their biggest contribution was to co-host a summit on methane, which remains a blind spot in all the focus on carbon emissions.

Did everybody get what they wanted? Clearly not. But while the COP process itself remains perpetually inadequate to the task, there are nevertheless signs of progress, including on loss and damage, and this year offers the most significant step since the Paris agreement in 2015. In Paris the idea of binding agreements was abandoned in favour of voluntary contributions. That would only work if countries upped their game over time, and that appears to be working. Not fast enough yet, but there is forward movement. With fossil fuels finally named, there is an opportunity to move faster towards the end of the oil and gas that created the problem in the first place.

I didn’t spot this ahead of time, but perhaps this is something that only a petrostate could have acheived. I’m not sure I’m ready to admit it, but maybe the CEO of an oil company was exactly the right person to chair the conference – just this one time, to talk as an equal to that massive fossil fuel lobby, and deliver just this sentence. For that be true, we’d need to see fewer lobbyists next time, and see their influence waning over time as we push on and eliminate fossil fuels completely. And unfortunately COP29 is going be hosted by another petrostate in Azerbaijan.

I’m going to need more than four days to reach any conclusions on that thought. For now, I’ll take that foot in the door. “The world’s nations have now publicly agreed that they need to transition off fossil fuels,” as Bill McKibben says in his write-up of the COP. “That sentence will hang over every discussion from now on.”