After 10 days of climate talks at COP28 in Dubai, delegates now have just 48 hours to reach a meaningful agreement on phasing out the worldwide use of fossil fuels.
But while experts say nothing else will do when it comes to tackling the climate crisis, a large space at the summit is devoted to promoting so-called “technical solutions” to global warming – the idea that new discoveries could work. Let us keep emissions under control while continuing to use oil and gas for energy.
Such solutions include building a giant shield that could reflect some of the Sun’s light away from Earth, or a technology known as carbon capture and storage (CCS), which attempts to capture and control emissions at the point where fossil fuels are burned. .
Experts in Dubai are alarmed by the number of stalls devoted to unscientific geoengineering solutions such as giant solar shields, and say testing these ideas is harming already vulnerable countries.
Although there is no evidence yet that CCS technology can work at scale, negotiators in oil-producing countries are already talking about using it to “mitigate” or reduce the impact of fossil fuel combustion, suggesting that the final COP28 agreement should target only the target audience. “unreduced” fossil fuels.
“I think Cop is becoming a space where more and more people are trying to offer technological solutions to the crisis,” says Sara Shaw, climate justice and energy program coordinator at Friends of the Earth International. Independent. “And there are real challenges with that.
“This is the threat we hear from people on the ground: [related to geoengineering experiments] In some cases, it is as serious a threat as the impact of fossil fuel extraction [itself],” says.
Geoengineering projects have experimented on Indigenous lands in Alaska, with proposals to dump large amounts of silica glass microbeads onto Arctic ice without consent or consultation, Ms. Shaw said. “If such ‘solutions’ result in the usurpation or poisoning of land, they are certainly not solutions,” she says.
“Not only that, [promoting technical solutions] “It allows fossil fuel extraction operations to continue, which is kind of a get-out-of-jail-free card for fossil fuel companies.”
Climate activists staged a protest against these technical proposals on Friday morning, demanding a focus on “real solutions” instead, and chants of “our planet is not for sale” echoed in front of the flag-lined boulevard where world leaders walked. First day of the summit.
“No carbon market, no geoengineering, no offsetting” was their demand.
CCS technology, although unproven and quite expensive, has received a lot of support in Dubai, especially from fossil fuel industrialists.
In a recently published report, scientists from the University of Oxford said that the idea that all future problematic carbon dioxide emissions could be safely and permanently buried with CCS technologies is deeply mistaken.
Experts say that these technologies, which are often portrayed as ready for implementation, are far from being ready for use at the required scale and bring with them associated risks and uncertainties.
Lisa Fischer, program leader for climate and energy advocacy group E3G, says there were 475 lobbyists for CCS alone at the summit in Dubai. “[It] “This shows that the fossil fuel industry knows there is a real possibility that the world will move towards an agreement to phase out fossil fuels on a global scale.”
“The reality is that it is expensive to capture emissions and bury them rather than avoid them.
“Most countries know this, which is why we have seen pressure to now remove the word “mitigation” from the text and point out the limited role of carbon capture technologies in tackling climate change, especially in this decade.”
Another solution put forward at the summit is the use of hydrogen as a power source. But Shaw says the “majority” of hydrogen produced globally is “fossil hydrogen,” meaning the power to produce hydrogen from water comes from burning fossil fuels.
“On the surface something like hydrogen looks and sounds pretty attractive, but when you look at what’s actually required it’s almost all fossil hydrogen, almost all of it.”
“We are trying to implement all these risky technologies. “But I think the cost of that is too high, and we know what the answers are.”
At the beginning of the summit, UN chief Antonio Guterres called on countries to agree to phase out fossil fuels. “Not to reduce, not to reduce. “Phase out with a clear time frame,” he told world leaders.
Experts say this is the only way to deal with the climate crisis.
“I think what we’re looking for for fossil fuel phase-out is language that excludes that term unabated,” Shaw says. “There’s no time left to linger. We’re Running Out of Time.”