Analysis: What did and didn’t get done at COP28 climate summit

By Ishaan Tharoor / The Washington Post

At the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, dubbed COP28, which drew to a close last week, tens of thousands of delegates, experts, lobbyists and activists descended on a lavish campus erected in the Emirati metropolis to stave off a looming planetary catastrophe.

From the outset, as my colleague Chico Harlan observed, the summit was a “jumble of contradictions,” a forum hosted by an oil-pumping petrostate. Proceedings were always going to be complicated, but the result of days of wrangling over a final communiqué yielded what most analysts have cast as a qualified success.

The summit’s hosts, led by state oil executive Sultan Al Jaber, exulted in staging of a first-class event that ultimately obscured criticism of the UAE’s pivotal role in the fossil fuel ecosystem. Al Jaber, whose appointment at the head of the summit itself elicited a huge backlash from climate campaigners, hailed the “new mind-set” of inclusivity that shaped deliberations.

The agreement taking governments forward calls for “transitioning away from fossil fuels,” a declaration mostly absent in close to three decades of U.N. climate talks. It emerged from a complex set of geopolitics.

“Major Gulf oil exporters aligned with big fossil fuel consumers, such as China and India, in pushing back against fossil fuel goals that Europeans and island nations described as essential,” Harlan explained. “In a sign of the twisted interests, some of the countries calling to phase down oil and gas — the United States, Canada, Norway and Australia — are simultaneously planning expansion projects.”

But, as my colleague Brady Dennis noted, the agreement in its current form does not address the long-standing goal enshrined in the 2015 Paris agreement to prevent global warming from surpassing more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels; a threshold beyond which scientists and researchers warn of epochal climactic disasters. The understandings forged in Dubai do “little to ensure that the world will hit the brakes fast enough to avoid the ever-worsening consequences of warming,” Dennis wrote.

Analysts are still parsing the voluminous document that emerged from COP28. The key takeaway, for now, is the decision by its drafters after negotiations to do away with the more aggressive concept of “phasing out” fossil fuels, and instead favor language surrounding a “transition.” This is not simply semantic gymnastics; it points to the reality of myriad countries scaling up their fossil fuel activities even while working toward decarbonizing their economies.

“Rather than shutting down oil wells, as ‘phasing out’ would suggest, by using the wording ‘transitioning away’ the U.N. is effectively calling on countries to first reduce demand,” wrote Bloomberg’s Javier Blas. “It may sound like splitting hairs, but it’s an important distinction. That’s why Saudi officials emerged from the COP28 summit smiling. In future gatherings, they can argue that they will keep pumping oil until there are signs that transition is underway.”

Officials who aren’t smiling include the representatives of small island nations on the front lines of climate change, whose existential peril sits awkwardly against the ballooning spectacle of the annual summits, attended by hordes of lobbyists and canape-munching executives. “[We] did not come here to sign our death warrant,” John Silk, minister of natural resources and commerce for the Marshall Islands, said in the early days of the summit. It’s fair to suggest the outcome of COP28 does not match his sense of urgency.

“It’s not enough to talk about the principle of phasing out fossil fuels. We also need to know at what pace,” noted an editorial in French daily Le Monde. “The final text of COP28 does not set a precise timetable, other than to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Consensus could only be reached by leaving the door open to a series of loopholes likely to slow the momentum.”

That was to be expected. “No gathering of so many countries and different interests can reach total agreement on all issues,” argued an editorial in the National, a UAE-based English daily, pointing to progress. “Getting major energy producers and consumers to discuss common interests with developing nations and climate campaigners is a significant step forward from the days when many countries still doubted the science on climate change.”

Skeptics on the right still scoff at the clash between the West’s decarbonizing agenda and the actions of countries like China and India, which remain big fossil fuel consumers. “The deal they agreed to has all the force and idealism of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact that outlawed war,” declared a Wall Street Journal editorial, bemoaning the “arrogance of global elites” in Europe and the United States who are forcing their publics to swallow the costs of the energy transition while nations elsewhere keep powering their rising economies on coal.

In India, commentators pushed back. “A large part of the blame for the global failure to curb fossil fuel use gets laid at the doors of India and China. This is unfair and simplistic,” noted an editorial in the Indian Express. “A distinction must be made between the imperative of lifting large sections of the Global South out of poverty and the interests of oil cartels.”

Climate activists are broadly unimpressed. At a Washington panel event hosted by The Atlantic on Thursday, Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, a left-leaning U.S. climate advocacy group, said “the number of fossil fuel lobbyists at COP 28” was “ridiculous” and that social movements focused on climate activism ought to work harder in the coming years to “stigmatize” these executives.

Jade Begay, who sits on the White House’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council, said at the same panel that what COP28 achieved “is not enough.” But, she added, “never in the history of these 28 climate negotiations has there been a mention of fossil fuels, so we’ve done something.”

Ishaan Tharoor is a foreign affairs columnist at The Washington Post, where he authors the Today’s WorldView newsletter and column. Follow him on X @ishaantharoor.