I have a confession to make: I don’t usually follow the UN climate change conference proceedings until the very end.
This year’s COP28 was no different. Not because it was hosted by an oil and gas power, and not because neither President Biden nor the Pope attended.
Rather, I’ve come to view all Conferences of the Parties (COP) as lagging indicators of what needs to happen. More recently, they’ve also become lagging indicators of what’s actually happening in the world.
If I were a diplomat, I’d track the proceedings like a rabid Apple fan awaiting the shipment of a new iPhone. But I’m not; I’m a climate reporter originally trained as an ecologist. I’ve been studying climate and the environment for nearly a quarter century, and I saw the fingerprints of climate change in my own doctoral research over 15 years ago.
I’ve seen COPs come and go. In that time, the world’s governments have made some significant progress on reining in emissions growth. And at the same time, because fossil fuel use is still expanding, they have fallen woefully short.
That’s not to say that the COP proceedings are not important. There have been a few landmark conferences — COP3 in Kyoto and COP21 in Paris stand out — but the annual pace of the gatherings appears to be more about building trust and maintaining relationships than delivering yearly breakthroughs, even though the stakes get higher every year that the world continues to burn fossil fuels.
From the start, hopes weren’t high for this year’s conference. For one, it was hosted by the world’s seventh largest oil producer, the United Arab Emirates. Documents leaked shortly before COP28 showed that the country was planning to use the meeting to strike oil and gas deals with 15 countries. Days later, Sultan Al Jaber, the COP28 president and CEO of the country’s state oil company, said there was “no science” to support the idea that halting the use of fossil fuels will help the world hit the 1.5°C target agreed upon in Paris — despite the fact that there’s ample evidence to the contrary.
Each of those news stories are vital in keeping the world’s leaders honest. But for me, the finer details of horse trading at a political event is less important than the broader trends that underpin it all.
This year’s crowning achievement was the call for a transition away from fossil fuels “in a just, orderly and equitable manner” so the world can hit net zero carbon emissions by 2050 “in keeping with the science” — no doubt a dig at Al Jaber. It’s the first time a COP agreement has called out fossil fuels specifically, but it’s also less ambitious language than a “phase out” of fossil fuels, which many countries had pushed for. Still, it’s at least an acknowledgment that fossil fuels are living on borrowed time.
By 2050, COP28 probably won’t be hailed as a landmark conference. Nor should it be. The meeting was merely a global affirmation of the energy transition that’s already underway. In that sense, it is more of an admission of fact than an ambitious statement about the future.
Renewable energy has been growing by leaps and bounds, with capacity more than doubling in the last decade. The International Energy Agency, which tends to produce cautious forecasts, conservatively expects green energy to grow another 50% in the next four years.
The agency also thinks peak oil might happen in the next decade, delayed only by strong demand from aviation and petrochemical production. Oil demand from ground transportation is dropping, thanks to the shift to EVs. In the U.S. alone, about a quarter of all new cars and light trucks in the U.S. will be electric by 2026; in the EU and China, the share will be even higher.
All of this has happened against a backdrop of COP proceedings that, since the Kyoto Protocol in 1992 and the smaller Doha Amendment in 2012, have had no legal teeth, just aspirational language and voluntary targets. And yet, since the Paris Agreement in 2015 and its voluntary targets, the energy transition has sped up.
The danger, of course, is that the rate of change won’t be rapid enough to forestall dangerous, maybe even catastrophic warming. The trends we see today would have been more helpful a decade or two ago. But they’re coming today, and we’ll be lucky to fall across the finish line.