Anyone following climate and energy news leading up to the COP28 United Nations climate negotiations beginning this week in Dubai might be suffering from some mental whiplash.
At one moment you might read that clean energy sources like wind and solar are growing at a record pace, only to learn in the next moment that greenhouse emissions from fossil fuels remain stubbornly high. Perhaps you read that global oil and gas demand is expected to peak by 2030, then read that Exxon Mobil and Chevron made more long-term oil investments. Also, in that mix of news, headlines about floods, fires and other weather extremes linked to our warming atmosphere.
"It's an odd moment, right?" Princeton University assistant professor Jesse Jenkins told Newsweek. "There's reason for lots of optimism, but there's also reason to take stock of the tragic effects that we are going to have to live with."
Jenkins leads Princeton's ZERO Lab seeking improvements to energy and climate policy. He said this year's climate-driven disasters remind us that we are already in a dangerous period of warming. U.N. negotiators had aimed to avoid dangerous interference with the climate when they launched the Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC. But three decades later the dangers are no longer just in science journals and computer models, they are just outside our doors.
"It's a tragic failure," Jenkins said. "On the other hand, the current generation really has mobilized in a way that it is going to be transformative and that can prevent far worse damages in the future."
Jenkins said his lab's analysis of U.S. legislation supporting clean technology and renewables shows clean energy growth will double the pace of the country's decarbonization, one of several hopeful signs that developed countries are greening their energy economies. However, that clean energy growth is still offset by fossil fuel use elsewhere, especially in rapidly developing countries.
Harvard University science historian Naomi Oreskes, a frequent author on climate change, said she doubts that we are really in an energy transition.
"This new energy production has not replaced fossil fuels, it's simply added to it," Oreskes told Newsweek. We have the benefit of more energy to meet growing global demand, she said, but we still have a "completely unacceptable" situation with climate change.
"The only meaningful progress in terms of the climate crisis is if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere begins to fall, and that has not happened," Oreskes said.
As world leaders assemble in Dubai, the big challenge will be to turn the remarkable addition of renewable energy into a true energy transition. Negotiators will look for ways to accelerate the growth of clean sources, drive out the dirty ones, and do that all fast enough to avoid the very dangerous degrees of warming that climate scientists say we must avoid. And all of it will play out in a nation made wealthy by the very resource at the root of the problem.
Paris Progress Report
The gathering in Dubai beginning Thursday is the 28th annual conference of the 198 participating nations, or parties, in the UNFCCC, thus the name Conference of Parties, or COP28. The most important result of past COPs came in Paris with an agreement reached at COP21 in 2015. In Paris, all participating countries agreed to limit warming beyond pre-industrial levels to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
Global average temperatures are already about 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and scientists say recent extraordinary temperatures will almost certainly make 2023 the warmest year on record.
In Dubai, COP28 will offer the first "global stocktake," a comprehensive assessment of how countries are doing to meet the Paris goals to bring down greenhouse gas emissions and limit warming. A recent report from the U.N. Environment Programme shows the daunting distance between where we are and where we need to be.
The report shows that full implementation of the plans that nations have put forward so far under the Paris Agreement still have the world on track for temperatures to rise nearly 3 degrees Celsius.
If yet another report warning about the need to reduce emissions sounds all too familiar, the U.N. authors are aware. Their report is titled "Broken Record," and its clever cover illustration shows a circular heat graph mimicking a badly warped vinyl LP, presumably playing the same message over and over again.
But perhaps that message is starting to get through. While global emissions are not yet falling, the report includes a silver lining heading into COP28: the increase in emissions has slowed. When parties entered the Paris Agreement, projections showed emissions growing 16 percent by 2030. Today, that growth is projected to be just 3 percent by the end of the decade.
Jesse Jenkins at Princeton said that's largely due to the boom in renewables to meet growing energy demand in developing economies.
"Much if not all of that demand is being met by clean energy and electric vehicles and other technologies that are now much more affordable solutions to power economic development and growth," he said.
Jenkins said other promising signs include the rapid adoption of electric vehicles and a sustained decrease in emissions in the U.S., where coal and oil demand have peaked.
In the European Union, the climate analysis company Kayrros found a similar drop in carbon emissions. European emissions in 2023 fell faster than they did during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the company said in its recent Carbon Watch report, and structural changes in the electricity sector mean emissions are unlikely to bounce back this time.
There are other hopeful indicators from the private sector, according to University of North Carolina assistant professor Angel Hsu. Hsu is founder and director of the Data-Driven EnviroLab where one of the projects is a Net Zero Tracker keeping tabs on the states, cities and companies committing to decarbonize.
"We recently surpassed the 1,000th company on the Net Zero Tracker," Hsu told Newsweek in an email exchange. "It shows that momentum is on the right side of net zero."
Petroleum Problems
COP28 negotiators will consider climate financing and other tools to triple the deployment of clean energy by 2030. But to make sure that clean energy really drives down emissions, Hsu said, there must also be a deliberate plan to phase out fossil fuels.
"The focus on fossil fuels remains paramount," she said. Her lab's Net Zero Tracker shows voluntary emissions reduction pledges by energy companies are not working. "Despite 75 fossil fuel companies setting net-zero targets, none of these targets are deemed credible," Hsu said.
The COP28 host country embodies this conflict. The United Arab Emirates is the world's eighth largest oil producer and the UAE's president designate for COP28, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, is also an executive with the national oil company.
"This clear conflict of interest raises concerns, given the UAE's projected increase in emissions and insufficient commitments regarding emissions cuts," Hsu said.
The UAE is investing heavily in renewable energy, and recently opened what it claims to be the world's largest solar power array. But, Hsu said, the country's investments in fossil fuels are as much as four times greater.
Sultan Al Jaber is expected to use the opening days of COP28 to announce an agreement by oil and gas companies to reduce methane emissions from petroleum production, an important step toward controlling a very powerful greenhouse gas. But climate advocates and a growing coalition of business interests will be pushing for agreement on a phase-down of fossil fuel use.
One such business group, the Energy Transitions Commission, has put forward a plan to meet the Paris Agreement targets with a mix of sharp reductions of fossil fuels and greater use of technology to trap greenhouse emissions.
"It is axiomatically, mathematically obvious that to limit global warming to acceptable levels we have to have a zero-carbon economy by around midcentury," ETC Chairman Adair Turner told Newsweek. "But the key issue is what is the balance between actually reducing the use of fossil fuels and offsetting the use of fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage."
Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, uses chemical processes to strip CO2 from industrial effluent and then either reuse or store the CO2 deep underground. The technology is expensive and energy intensive, and critics say it has not yet been shown to be effective on a large scale. In a recent report, the International Energy Agency called CCS an "essential technology" in certain sectors but warned that "it is not a way to retain the status quo."
Turner said the ETC report found a path to meeting the Paris Agreement in which 85 percent of emissions reductions should come from reducing fossil fuels and 15 percent would depend on CCS to abate emissions from continued use of oil, gas and coal.
Part of what makes the ETC report stand out is the list of names attached to it. The group counts several heavy industry companies among its members, and two oil majors, BP and Shell, signed on to the recommendations. (A third oil company member, Malaysia-based Petronas, did not sign the final report.)
"We're absolutely convinced that this reduction is technologically possible and economically possible," Turner said.
The question now is whether enough of the COP28 delegates can be convinced of that, as well. Without some plan to end the use of dirty fuels, the growth in clean energy alone will likely not be enough to keep the Paris goals in sight.
About the writer
To read how Newsweek uses AI as a newsroom tool, Click here.
