It says something of the hopefulness that still binds human society that the world thought it could turn up to the home ground of the world’s biggest petrol-states and expect them to sign up to a deal that would end the gushing riches that flow from their fossil fuel pipelines.
Jon Jutsen, one of Australia’s most respected energy experts, and head of the RACE for 2030 Co-operative Research Centre, hasn’t been to any of the UN climate talks that have been held since the early 1990s, but asked this simple question that might have been asked by billions.
“COP this,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “I have never attended a COP, so maybe I am missing something. How can we have had 27 COPs and not addressed directly the obvious need to stop burning fossil fuels on a firm timetable?”
The answer is writ large in the draft text circulated to 190 nations overnight by the president of the COP28 climate talks in the UAE, who doubles up as the head of the UAE’s biggest oil company.
The science is clear that fossil fuels must be phased out – and rapidly – to have any chance of limiting average global warming to around 1.5°C, but the draft text distributed on Monday had no mention of phasing out fossil fuels, or even phasing down.
It was climate denial, pure and simple. This, at the annual conference designed to address the issue. It is as potentially devastating as it profoundly disappointing.
“We will not be a co-signatory to those death certificates,” said Australian climate and energy minister Chris Bowen, speaking on behalf of the Umbrella Group that also includes the US, UK, Norway and Canada – all, it should be noted, significant producers of fossil fuels.
“That what’s at stake for many countries who are represented here tonight and many people who do not have a voice,” Bowen said of the reference to “death certificates”, first cited by the Samoan representative.
Australians, though, should not be surprised, and they shouldn’t be pointing fingers, because they are just as culpable and have been sitting in the front row of climate denial for a generation or two of political chicanery.
The federal Coalition has sent more than half a dozen MPs and its energy spokesman to the UAE to argue that Australia, potentially a world-leader in the uptake of wind and solar and the transition to 100 per cent renewables, should immediately stop what it is doing.
Instead, energy spokesman Ted O’Brien says – with the same jaw-jutting bloody-mindedness of the most recent Coalition prime minister, Scott Morrison – Australia should wait for a technology that does not yet exist in the commercial market – small modular nuclear reactors – and continue to burn fossil fuels in the meantime.
It is remarkable that neither O’Brien, nor the bulk of mainstream media that breathlessly reported it, has stopped for a moment to think about the emptiness of the much-trumpeted nuclear pact to treble capacity by 2050.
It was signed in the UAE by just 22 countries, far short of the 50 or so that O’Brien claims are embracing nuclear, and calls for another 800 gigawatts of nuclear to be added in 26 years.
Contrast this with the pact to treble renewables, signed by 120 countries – a target they intend to meet in just six years, by 2030, and not 2050. More than 1,000 gigawatts of wind and solar will have been added just in the last three years across the world. Many thousands more gigawatts of wind and solar will be built by 2030.
Like the positions of the petro-state, the federal Coaliton’s position is pure climate (and technology) denial, just as it had been for the near decade they were in power.
Scientists are very clear about the threat to the 1.5°C target and the risks of cascading tipping points and climate breakdowns. Even the International Energy Agency, created half a century ago by the fossil fuel industry to protect the fossil fuel industry, agrees it should be given a firm closure date, and soon.
The Coalition’s position is no accident. It is part of the intense fossil fuel lobbying across the world that delivered thousands to COP28, where negotiations were overshadowed by what turned out to be a massive trade fair, and the gruesome campaigns being fought on social media and ginger groups across Australia.
The Coalition, now led by a man who joked about island nations sinking into the sea, refuses to accept the advice of energy market operators, regulators and the industry itself that the grid can be run largely, if not entirely on renewable energy. And they are at the centre of an extraordinary effort to convince others of the same.
The Institute of Public Affairs, the extreme right wing lobby group patronised by Tony Abbott and funded by Gina Rinehart, is embarking on another tour of regional Australia, determined to spread FUD about renewables and its impact on the regions.
The Murdoch media continues to lead a campaign of misinformation about wind and solar farms, and particularly offshore wind, but social media is the worst, where – as Donald Trump has learned – the most outrageous claims gather the most attention, and acceptance.
“The fossil fuel lobby has mobilised its enormous influence at COP28. Its influence is reflected in the extraordinarily weak draft text circulated by the Chair of the conference,” says Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, and a former member of the Climate Change Authority
“By avoiding any commitment to a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, the text repudiates the now-deafening message of climate science and consigns low-lying island states to inundation by rising seas.”
It may be that the words fossil fuel “phase down” might find their way back into the COP28 draft text, along with the hazy caveat of “unabated”, which could mean anything from being fully or partially abated with the everlasting unicorn of “carbon capture and storage.”
It might be the best that can be hoped for at a COP where the agreement of all 190 countries, with different agendas, is required. It won’t be of much comfort when it comes to the science of climate change.
“Reliance on carbon-capture and storage technology will not be enough to prevent accelerated warming in the presence of ongoing fossil fuel use,” associate Professor Jim Radford, the co-Director of the Research Centre for Future Landscapes in the Department of Environment and Genetics at La Trobe University
“To prevent catastrophic warming (beyond that already ‘locked in’), we must completely phase out fossil fuel use, transition to renewable sources of energy, and ensure our global carbon sinks of intact forests, woodlands, peatlands and wetlands are maintained.”
Some of our political leaders, however, clearly think it is just funny.
