By Elizabeth Shackelford / For the Chicago Tribune
As the 28th annual United Nations climate change conference, known by its acronym COP28, wrapped up last week, diplomats and activists rejoiced. In a historic first, nearly 200 countries signed an agreement to “transition away from fossil fuels.”
A decade or two ago, this might have been reason to celebrate, but the impact climate change has already caused should have set off a five-alarm fire. Anything short of consensus on urgent action won’t meet the moment.
We continue to compromise our climate change response at our peril. This was the hottest year on record, with deadly heat and humidity in parts of the United States and the Middle East and record ocean temperatures. Unprecedented wildfires shut people indoors thousands of miles away from the flames due to dangerous air pollution. Catastrophic storms and flooding hit Libya, India and the United States, while Chile and countries in the Horn of Africa saw their worst droughts in decades. All of this is causing trillions of dollars in economic costs and losses and massive human suffering.
It’s easy to understand why COP28’s agreement was welcome news though. This year’s climate conference was fraught, and expectations low. After all, the host country, the United Arab Emirates, is one of the world’s biggest oil and gas producers.
The conflict of interest was glaring. The chief executive of Abu Dhabi’s state-owned oil company, Sultan al Jaber, who presided over the event, recently denied that phasing out fossil fuels was even necessary to combat climate change. Given the nefarious role that oil companies have long played in undermining this fight, it was hardly surprising. But putting someone like this at the helm of the climate-solution debate gave a platform and legitimacy to the naysayers, stacking the deck against progress.
This was more than just a case of greenwashing, where states and companies promote projects and events designed to burnish their environmental image. COP28 was an attempt at sabotage, where several big oil-producing states hoped to soften or slow any commitments to phasing out the fossil fuels that make them wealthy. Al Jaber also reportedly planned to use the conference as an opportunity to strike new oil and gas deals with foreign governments.
“Team science” was bracing for the worst then when an initial draft agreement was circulated among the parties that explicitly cut any reference to phasing out fossil fuels, under pressure from Saudi Arabia and other wealthy oil-producing states.
Given this backdrop, the agreement reached was notable. Prior agreements failed to even reference fossil fuels specifically. This one calls on nations to cease adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by midcentury and to triple renewable energy by 2030.
But those commitments are nonbinding and unenforceable, and the way that many important players were dragged to the table gives little confidence that they will fulfill these voluntary aims; on time or ever. This includes not just big oil producers but also countries such as India and China that are counting on fossil fuels to keep fueling their growth.
The blame for these shortcomings, however, can’t be levied only upon the UAE and its petrostate cronies. The leading nations promoting climate change action aren’t meeting the moment either. It’s hard to shame others into sacrifice when the champions for action have also responded in contradictory ways.
The United States had its biggest legislative success yet with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act last year, which provided an unprecedented investment in the clean energy transition. But the same administration that passed that signature law also presided over an expansion of oil and gas production and failed to end fossil fuel subsidies, hampering that transition by keeping fossil fuel prices artificially low. The country’s dysfunctional politics makes it hard to have hope in its ability to lead the charge.
Europe faces similar obstacles. The war in Ukraine forced a reckoning with Europe’s heavy reliance on Russia for energy. But rather than kick-starting a faster transition, countries like Germany turned back to burning coal.
We know what must be done. Whatever the oil industry and its purchased politicians want us to believe, the science is unassailable — burning fossil fuels is causing climate change. We even have the tools to rein it in, with technology for renewable energy sources improving every day.
But we’re still getting even worse. We know a dramatic reduction and ultimate phaseout of fossil fuel emissions is critical, and yet this year saw a 1.1 percent increase in them. Existential imperatives are proving insufficient to overcome greed, short-term interests, and political pressure.
COP28 has proven once again that, while coordinating some kind of global consensus is necessary, it’s far from sufficient. The United States can’t wait for everyone to agree on that future. If we want a world that takes climate change seriously enough to prevent parts of the world becoming unlivable, mass migration and food insecurity driving global conflict, and the weather becoming our number one cause of death, we need to do more to lead.
Transitioning off fossil fuels won’t be politically or economically easy. But from the preview we’ve already seen, the alternative will be much worse.
Elizabeth Shackelford is a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune. She was previously a U.S. diplomat and is the author of “The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age.” ©2023 Chicago Tribune.
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