DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — After days spent shaving off the edges of key warming problems, climate negotiators on Tuesday focused on the difficult task of dealing with fossil fuels, the root cause of what is overheating the planet.
As scientists, activists and United Nations officials repeatedly detailed how the world should phase out its use of coal, oil and natural gas, the conference hosted by the United Arab Emirates kicked off “energy transition day” with a session chaired by two senior officials . oil companies.
Negotiators prepared a new draft, called the Global Stocktake, that was supposed to be the main document of the UN talks, but it contained so many possibilities in its 24 pages that it did not give many clues about what would happen. Agreement was reached on when the session will end next week. Everything that is adopted has to be agreed upon by consensus, so it has to be near-unanimous.
“The central theme of this COP, the global stocktake, is to reach a conclusion on phasing out fossil fuels,” said climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics. “And unless we do that, I doubt we’ll see an improvement in temperature.”
David Waskow, director of international climate action at the World Resources Institute, said discussions about the global stockpile had made the climate talks in Dubai “a moment of reflection”. “It reveals whether we are doing enough to reduce emissions, adapt and prepare for climate change, and increase financing from developed countries to developing countries.”
Options in the draft range from the less stringent “coal power reduction” to the simple but dramatic “orderly and equitable phase out of fossil fuels.”
Scientists who follow climate action said it’s crucial to monitor language for gaps.
“We need to phase out fossil fuels completely, without a back door,” said Niklas Hohne of the New Climate Institute. “At this conference, at the briefing table, there are actually a lot of backdoors being proposed to extend the life of fossil fuels, and one of them is talking about ‘unreduced’ fossil fuels.”
Including “without mitigation” means allowing the burning of fossil fuels as long as their emissions can be captured and stored, a technology much talked about but not proven to actually work well, Hohne and other scientists said.
Hohne and Hare’s organizations released an updated version of the Climate Action Tracker on Tuesday, which looks at nations’ commitments, policies and actions and tries to calculate what kind of temperature increases that means. He found that the world was heading in the wrong direction based on the commitments made.
A year ago, the world’s commitments, if met, would have led to 2.4 degrees Celsius (4.3 Fahrenheit) of warming compared to pre-industrial times, but now this has increased to 2.5 degrees (4.5 Fahrenheit). That’s because many countries with weak commitments – particularly Indonesia and Iran – are increasing their emissions so much that the world is moving towards a warmer path, said Claire Stockwell of Climate Analytics, lead author of the report.
“We haven’t seen any action from governments,” Stockwell said.
“Many countries are still financing significant expansion of fossil fuels,” said New Climate Institute analyst Ana Missirliu. “Last year, since the previous COP, we have seen a series of worrying announcements, starting with (host country) the UAE, whose $150 billion investment plan to expand the oil and gas industry has largely – overwhelmingly – eclipsed its investment in renewables.” energy investment plans.”
Missirliu also pointed out that fossil fuel production has increased in the USA, England and Saudi Arabia.
But Stockwell said a bright spot was that China, the world’s biggest carbon polluter, reached peak emissions in 2025, years earlier than promised, and fell to around 2017 levels by 2035.
Activists staged a series of events and actions at the summit on Tuesday to increase pressure on conference participants to agree to phase out coal, oil and natural gas, which are responsible for most of the world’s emissions, and switch to clean energy. in a fair way.
The world is pumping 1.1% more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than last year, a team of scientists reported Tuesday, largely due to increased pollution from China and India.
The protests, confined to “action zones” around the UN area, centered on calls for funding to phase out fossil fuels and accelerate the transition to clean energy.
More than 100 countries have committed to tripling their renewable capacity and doubling their energy efficiency by the end of the decade.
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Jamey Keaten and Gaurav Saini of The Press Trust of India contributed to this report.
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