These sea turtles are an example of our interconnected natural world, with some travelling on to Brazil, Newfoundland and West Africa. Similarly, the conservation efforts on which their survival depends are woven together. “It’s a global effort,” says Arjoon, who founded the Guyana Marine Conservation Society. 

The same, of course, could be said of the battle that is underway to stop catastrophic climate change. But as the world lurches toward increasingly dire environmental scenarios, vows for equitable climate action don’t materialize. As a result, fault lines are increasingly visible, including not far from the beach Arjoon has worked to protect, where ExxonMobil found deep-water oil in 2015. Now, Guyana is the newest petrostate  at a time when the world is scrambling to limit global warming to 1.5°C. The tiny nation of 800,000 is already the fastest-growing economy, and by 2035, it may be the fourth-largest offshore oil producer on the planet. 

“I want you to quote me as bluntly as you can,” Arjoon says. “If you want Guyana to leave its oil in the ground, you start leading by example.” 

They are surprising words from a celebrated environmentalist and are indicative of a shifting dynamic that is seeing developing countries go unapologetically on the offensive when it comes to climate diplomacy – at a time when cooperation is desperately needed. Increasingly, voices from the Global South are pushing back against the “hypocrisy” of the Global North, which got rich in an industrialized world powered by fossil fuels and continues to profit from and drive their extraction. It’s the North – primarily the United States and Europe – that is overwhelmingly responsible for the historic emissions that are choking our planet. And it’s the South that has been paying the heftiest climate price, underdeveloped and locked in a vicious cycle of indebtedness that makes it impossible to properly respond to the climate chaos already battering it, let alone prepare for what is to come. 

Mohamed Irfaan Ali, the president of Guyana, summed up the emerging dynamic neatly in a BBC interview that went viral earlier this year. He bristled at questions about his country’s decision to drill for oil and to reap immense economic benefits at a time when the world needs to wean itself off fossil fuels. “I’m going to lecture you on climate change,” a finger-pointing Ali told the interviewer, as he rattled off the efforts made by Guyana to protect its carbon-sequestering forest “that the world enjoys” and yet, he said, doesn’t value. “Guess what? Even with our greatest exploration of the oil and gas resources we have now, we will still be net-zero,” he claimed. 

If you want Guyana to leave its oil in the ground, you start leading by example.

 

– Annette Arjoon, Guyana Marine Conservation Society

Climate experts have criticized UN forest accounting rules used by Guyana and other nations as a licence to extract fossil fuels. But aid organizations and nations on the front lines of climate change have long called out the double standards of wealthier nations, some of which have vowed to cut aid to fossil-fuel-producing countries, all the while continuing to spew emissions at rates several hundred times higher than their poorer counterparts. 

Of course, the Global South is a diverse place, and its positions reflect that. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, has suspended new oil and gas contracts, a first for a major petroleum-producing country. In Guyana, there is also division, as evidenced by a 2021 lawsuit against fossil fuel production.  

In fact, the Global South’s own contribution to climate change is not uniform. While the North is responsible for about half of all historical emissions, the South’s emissions have skyrocketed since 1990 and now make up 63% of all greenhouse gases, driven mostly by China, which has become the world’s factory for consumer goods. Still, Europe and North America continue to produce emissions that outstrip the share of their populations, while most Global South nations have a fraction of their climate footprints. 

The increasing profile of voices rooted in the Global South is evidence of “a tectonic shift in power relations,” notes Glada Lahn, a senior research fellow at the United Kingdom’s Chatham House Environment and Society Centre. With the rise of China, along with Brazil and other middle powers in the Middle East, suddenly there are options for Global South countries when it comes to finance, trade and investment that embolden their voice. “This means governments feel they have more choice of partners and don’t have to fall in line with the U.S. or one or two former colonial powers,” Lahn says. 

Breaking free of the debt–fossil fuel trap

And then there is the staggering issue of debt. Global South countries are paying five times more on debt payments than on addressing the climate crisis, according to a report by 35 aid organizations called The Debt–Fossil Fuel Trap. This, in turn, is fuelling a fossil-fuel-dependency cycle, the report’s authors found, making it virtually impossible for fossil-fuel-rich countries like Argentina, Uganda and Mozambique to shift to renewables.

While some in the Global South say these nations should be free to exploit their own resources while the wealthier nations with much larger carbon footprints phase them out, others say that what is needed are climate reparations and debt cancellation. Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, has been leading that charge on a mission to retool how the global financial system works so that it doesn’t punish southern countries like hers and allows them to prepare for climate change. Her proposals include reforming the lending policies of organizations such as the World Bank to allow for a massive cash infusion to vulnerable nations; taxing the profits of petroleum companies; and, more recently, cancelling the debt of climate-ravaged nations. 

Developing nations have been clamouring for rich countries to help them on these issues for decades. Finally, in what was heralded as a “climate justice milestone” at the COP27 climate conference in 2022, wealthy nations – including the United States and 27 countries in the European Union – agreed to pay into a “loss and damage” fund. The fund is meant to provide financial assistance to countries most vulnerable to climate change. Last year, at COP28 in Dubai, countries pledged around $700 million toward that promise, a tiny fraction of the billions needed every year. More than $100-billion in climate financing has also been mobilized and provided in recent years, according to a report released by the Organization of Economic Development and Cooperation.

Last year’s UN climate conference also saw countries draft, for the first time, “a roadmap for transitioning away from fossil fuels.” But for all their commitments, and grave acknowledgements that time is running out for meaningful climate action, leaders of the Global North continue to bet on fossil fuels. U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who may be ousted in an upcoming snap election, has said he intends to “take every last drop” of oil from the North Sea. The United States is pushing for new oil exploration, despite President Joe Biden’s decision to freeze new export permits for gas. Canada’s own oil production is slated to increase as emissions continue to inch up. 

Meanwhile, Uganda’s minister of energy and mineral development said that telling the country not to drill for oil was condemning it to poverty and that it would accept a phase-out of fossil fuels only if “wealthy long-time producers quit first.”

“This is a signal of really an unwillingness of world leaders, both in developed and developing nations, to abide by what they promised to do,” says Claudio Angelo, with the Brazil-based Observatório do Clima.

He says that while rich nations have “failed humanity” for not providing climate finance and for not assisting developing countries to leapfrog from fossil fuels into clean technologies and a green economy, developing nations “have no excuse to think their product won’t kill us all, because that’s precisely what it will do to humankind.” 

“It’s not a question of being rich or poor,” he says. “It’s about frying or not frying.” 

The right to develop

Omar Elmawi, a Kenyan lawyer and environmentalist with the Don’t Gas Africa campaign, applauds many of the points made by the president of Guyana but differs on his defence of oil extraction. “What’s wrong is wrong,” he says on a call from Washington, D.C., where he attended the World Bank’s annual spring meetings in April. The question, in his mind, is not about fossil fuels. “The question is the right to development.” 

Most of the Global South, excluding China, is not as developed as the North, and its carbon footprint reflects that. The average person in a high-income country generates about 30 times more emissions than those in low-income countries. “We still need to develop, but how do we develop in a way that is climate compatible?” Elmawi asks. “The best way to do it is renewable energy – cheap, cleaner, easier to deploy.” But it must be leveraged to generate true value for Africans, he argues, which means selling a complete product, not just cheap labour. Even now, the burgeoning green hydrogen development on the continent is intended not for African consumption but for export, to Europe and the rest of the world. 

It’s not a question of being rich or poor. It’s about frying or not frying.

 

– Claudio Angelo, Observatório do Clima

For Africans, oil, gas and coal are still being sold as the best and quickest way to get the millions of people who are energy-poor on the continent crucial power, Elmawi says. And yet, the numbers don’t add up. He points to Nigeria, the ninth-largest oil exporter in the world and a major gas producer – all of which is exported. So Nigeria imports nearly all of the fuel used by its own citizens and ends up paying more. “The system is already designed to make sure that we don’t benefit and the Global North does,” says Elmawi, who notes that less than 2% of the global investments in renewables went to Africa in the last two decades. 

Radical action on emissions, biodiversity and equality requires North–South cooperation, Lahn, the Chatham House expert, says. The truth is that it should all go together, because if action on climate and the environment is not improving inequality, it will continue to face opposition, she notes. “Vested interests in the environmentally damaging economy we have will inevitably manipulate this schism in their favour,” she says. “I’ve seen [the BBC Guyana] interview being used to polarize the issue of climate on social media. And polarization and loss of trust harms efforts at cooperation.”

Brazilian leadership could be vital

Still, Lahn is hopeful that some positive things can come out of Brazil’s leadership of the G20 this year, as President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva pushes for more South–North cooperation through issues such as taxing wealth and carbon more equitably. In a speech at COP28, Lula said that Brazil was joining the OPEC+ group of petroleum-producing nations in a bid to convince those countries that the end of fossil fuels is on the horizon. “Preparing means using the money they make to invest so that continents like Africa and Latin America can produce the renewable fuels they need, especially green hydrogen,” he added.

A voice like Brazil’s, which carries considerable clout as a member of the BRICS group of countries, “would send a signal,” Lahn says, “and one free of the burden of colonial history.” 

The future depends on it. In Guyana, the weather patterns are less predictable and more intense. “So we have flooding where we didn’t have flooding,” Arjoon says, and extreme droughts that are parching a country known as the “land of many waters.” 

She sees in the Exxon oil project a chance to address the rampant poverty that disproportionately affects Indigenous communities and to generate wealth that will keep young Guyanese from leaving their country, in search of better economic opportunities abroad. She believes it has to, and can be done in an environmentally responsible way.

“I’m seeing very visible evidence of the revenues of oil and gas. I’m seeing communities that never had water, never had lights, never had schools, never had health centres being given those basic facilities,” she says. “Why should the onus be on Guyana to save the world? This needs to be a global effort.”

Photo: People wait at the Stabroek Market to ferry across the Demerara River, near a container ship in Georgetown, Guyana, in April 2023. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires–based journalist and associate editor at Corporate Knights.

The post How the Global South told the North to stop lecturing it on climate appeared first on Corporate Knights.

It was the signature piece from the Star Wars series and a gateway into a world of lightsabers, space, a worrywart robot named C-3PO and the mysterious force, described by Obi-Wan Kenobi as “an energy field created by all living things.” It served as a sort of connective tissue for all living things and could be tapped into for dark or light purposes.

I couldn’t help but notice the parallels at this year’s annual UN Climate Change Conference, COP28, when the CEO of ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, descended upon the discussions for the first time since they started holding them in 1995. Woods had a message to share: UN climate talks “put way too much emphasis on getting rid of fossil fuels, oil and gas and not . . . on dealing with the emissions associated with them.” This was hard to square with what UN Secretary-General António Guterres was saying, namely that ending fossil fuel use is the only way to save a burning planet.

In the end, world leaders agreed to a roadmap that zeroed in on fossil fuels and the necessity of “transitioning away” from them “in our energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” This was historic and insufficient, as the chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, Tzeporah Berman, put it. It was historic because for the first time in 28 UN climate summits, the enemy of a safe climate was specifically called out. And it was insufficient because there was no commitment to an outright phaseout of fossil fuels, like the world successfully did in the 1980s with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to stop the destruction of the ozone layer. It was also insufficient because the renewable projects required to transform our energy system are still largely underfunded.

Canada’s former central bank governor, Mark Carney, noted that this transition will require US$200 trillion of funds between now and 2050. That works out to about US$7 trillion a year, or triple what we are currently doing. This is not an impossible lift for a global economy that generates US$100 trillion a year of gross domestic product.

Everyone from conservatives to liberals – whatever those terms mean these days – should be able to agree that directing less than a 10th of our income to save the only home we have is not a bad deal.

But we are going to need a healthy dose of Luke Skywalkers to take on the desperate imperial fossil fuel forces, who still harbour astounding mind-bending abilities.

Anything is possible in politics, which can be a good thing in a time that requires change. It can also get wild, fast. A former guerrilla fighter, Gustavo Petro, is now running Colombia, whose economy is marinated in fossil fuel wealth, and has pledged to ditch fossil fuels and focus on stewarding Colombia’s “biological wealth.” In Argentina, a fellow G20 country, a former tantric sex guru, Javier Milei, is now head of state, and he is calling climate change a “socialist lie.”

See what I mean by wild? This is why we need business leaders not just to follow but to boldly guide the way forward to a new clean energy economy. The small-minded excuses around fiduciary constraints and short-term shareholders are, as Elon Musk has shown, a bunch of hooey.

We need more business leaders going all in to put climate solutions at the heart of their expansion plans. We need them to provide some guardrails for volatile political leaders, and we need them to speak up, and speak up loudly, for a more sustainable future, as Ralph Nader suggests.

In 2022, according to BloombergNEF, clean energy investments surged to US$1.1 trillion, growing at a three-year annualized clip of 29%. At this rate, by the end of this decade, we will exceed the US$7 trillion we need to be deploying.

But I don’t think the forces of darkness are going down without a fight, and they still have a few tricks up their sleeves. So here is a call to all business leaders on the right side of history in this struggle: may the force be with you.

Toby Heaps is co-founder and publisher of Corporate Knights.

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So now that the dust has settled, who left Dubai happy and who went home empty-handed? Let’s ask the experts.

First, the winners.

COP28 ended with a historic agreement to “transition away” from using fossil fuels in energy systems, the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions altering Earth’s climate. So why did the companies plying coal, oil and gas have a good summit?

As we reported last week, the failure to include stronger language in the final text (including the promise of a definitive “phase-out” of fossil fuels) was condemned by climate and energy researchers. “Abated” burning of coal (the dirtiest fossil fuel) is permitted in the text, but with no guidance on how much of the emissions must be captured and stored to be considered abated, COP28 left a loophole wide enough to drive a coal train through.

Natural gas also snuck into the text as a protected “transitional fuel”. Research has indicated that leaks of methane (a potent but short-lived greenhouse gas) from oil and gas infrastructure can actually make natural gas worse for the climate than coal.

A good thing more than 50 oil companies pledged to plug these leaks at COP28 (although the majority of firms haven’t signed). Mark Maslin, Priti Parikh and Simon Chin-Yee, a team of climate experts at UCL, note that gas is a healthier option for home cooking in developing countries than burning wood.

“Nonetheless, there really should be a timeline attached to the use of these transitional fuels,” they say. (Such a phase-out deadline was deemed “too controversial” to even discuss.)

An agreement referencing fossil fuels – between nearly 200 countries and brokered by a petrostate – is still startling says Matt McDonald, an associate professor of international relations at The University of Queensland. An acknowledgement that these fuels must be eliminated has eluded negotiators for three decades, he says.

Perhaps the severity of the climate crisis is starting to sink in.

“In 2023, temperatures are already spiking past the crucial threshold of 1.5°C,” McDonald says. “The global stocktake of emissions cuts released in advance of the talks shows our current efforts are not enough to stop further warming.”

Critically, this agreement is non-binding and will not limit the search for, extraction and burning of fossil fuels, as McDonald highlights:

“Countries such as Australia advocated stronger language on ending fossil fuels while maintaining a steady pipeline of new fossil fuel projects at home.”

Who suffers from this arrangement? The Australian public for a start, according to Fergus Green, a lecturer in political theory and public policy at UCL.

“The foreign-owned corporations that produce most of our coal and gas pay little tax and employ relatively few people, while capturing billions of dollars in state and federal government subsidies,” he says.

“Scaling up as a clean energy superpower could bring more economic growth, jobs and tax revenue than would be lost from fossil fuels – especially if we taxed the fossil fuel industry properly on its way out.”

Small islands

Now let’s hear from the other losers.

COP28 seemed to start well. On the first day, delegates agreed a loss and damage fund to compensate developing countries for the consequences of climate change – lost livelihoods, collapsed ecosystems, drowned homes – they cannot adapt to.

How the fund will work is unclear but present arrangements privilege donors (developed countries) over recipients.

Wealthy nations that have emitted the most and are responsible for much of the problem have pledged US$700 million (£550 million) so far. Compare that with the actual annual cost of climate-related loss and damage in developing countries, which is estimated to be somewhere between US$100 billion and US$580 billion.

Compare that with how much the UAE hosts spent on building COP28’s venue (US$7 billion), say Maslin, Parikh and Chin-Yee.

The overdue bill will lengthen as long as fossil fuels are dug up and burned. And it’s the world’s small islands where the greatest costs will be borne.

“Scientific evidence is clear,” says Alana Malinde S.N. Lancaster, head of the Caribbean Environmental Law Unit at the University of the West Indies in Barbados. “Rapidly eliminating coal, oil and gas is necessary to limit global warming to 1.5°C, as enshrined in the Paris agreement. Even at this limit, many small islands will face a drastic increase in coastal flooding from sea-level rise, and other effects which could render these countries uninhabitable.”

At the Dubai talks, delegates belonging to the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis) said that without an immediate fossil fuel phase-out, the final text was “a death certificate” and the product of a process that “has failed us”.

Aosis had also hoped for an agreement to double funding to help developing countries adapt to climate change, Lancaster says.

“The agreement on adaptation in Dubai talks generally of the need for more finance, but makes few commitments,” says Susannah Fisher, a principal research fellow in geography at UCL. That conversation will have to be renewed next year, she adds, at COP29 in Azerbaijan.

Meanwhile, the world is adapting to a harsher climate much too slowly – and unevenly.

“Between 3.3 and 3.6 billion people live in places that are expected to be highly vulnerable to climate change,” Fisher says. “In Africa, tens of thousands of people will die from extreme heat unless radical measures are taken to adapt. Between 800 million and 3 billion people will not have enough water at 2°C global warming – and up to 4 billion at 4°C. We also have very little evidence that funded adaptation measures are working.”

Food producers

COP28 was applauded for finally talking about food.

How the world produces food, how it gets it to people and how it’s disposed of (or wasted) accounts for one-third of greenhouse gas emissions. Roughly 80% of food production is powered by fossil fuels and agriculture is the leading cause of biodiversity loss. This was the first climate summit to get more than 130 countries to acknowledge that agriculture must “urgently adapt and transform”.

More than 200 African academics and civil society leaders are worried about what that transformation might entail.

“The call was for COP28 leaders to commit to separating food systems from the fossil fuels, antibiotics, preservatives, pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertilisers they are currently centred on,” says Florian Kroll, a PhD candidate in agrarian studies at the University of the Western Cape.

Kroll says COP28 did not debate how to curb the powerful monopolies keeping agriculture hooked on these fuels and chemicals. Without structural reforms to conventional agriculture, expanding its prevalence in Africa will only accelerate environmental destruction, he says.

The COP28 food statement also calls for partnerships between states and corporations to solve agriculture’s climate footprint. “This is especially problematic,” Kroll says. “Public-private partnerships allow corporations to influence government policy to their benefit, at the expense of local industries, the poor and the unemployed.”

In the food reforms envisaged at COP28, the World Trade Organisation would remain at the “core” of food distribution. This poses another big problem for traditional farmers, Kroll says:

“[The World Trade Organisation] pushes developing countries to extract finite mineral resources and grow export crops for global trade. Cheap imports undermine local industry and livelihoods.”

“Governments should instead promote local food production with short value chains and strengthen fair trade between African countries,” he adds.

Wildlife and ecosystems

Just last year, the world was celebrating a landmark deal to protect 30% of Earth’s land and sea for the benefit of biodiversity by 2030.

Even with all that space, species will have nowhere to hide from rising temperatures says Alex Pigot, a principal research fellow at UCL’s Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research.

“Our world has warmed by roughly 1.2°C since the pre-industrial period,” he says.

“Biodiversity is feeling the heat in all ecosystems and regions, from mountain tops to ocean depths.”

Tropical coral reefs once bleached rarely, Pigot says. Now, this vivid display of poor health and stress happens almost annually. Here the world has a preview of the devastation that is still in store for other ecosystems – and ultimately, us.

“If all national plans to cut emissions are fulfilled, the world would still be on track for 2.5°C-2.9°C of global warming by the end of the century,” Pigot says.

“As the thermal thresholds of more and more species are crossed, the capacity for ecosystems to adapt – as well as the societies that depend on them – will diminish.”

Jack Marley is environment + energy editor, UK edition, at The Conversation. 

This story first appeared in The Conversation. Read the original story here.

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A flawed but still transformative COP28 declaration signalled a transition out of fossil fuels and the dawn of renewable energy as United Nations climate negotiations concluded in Dubai, United Arab Emirates around noon local time today.The COP28 decision text, released Wednesday morning, included language about “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems” and “reducing both consumption and production of fossil fuels in a just, orderly and equitable manner so as to achieve net zero by, or before, or around 2050 in keeping with the science”.

The historic provisions, arrived at after round-the-clock negotiations by climate ministers and other senior officials, appeared in the energy transition section of the 21-page document. “A call to transition energy systems away from fossil fuels—the first time oil and gas had been included in a COP agreement—won over those demanding strong action; but oil producers and developing countries were reassured by assertions that countries are free to follow their own paths to net zero,” Bloomberg News reports.

“Taken together with a call to triple renewables deployment, [take] action on methane emissions, and get a loss and damage fund going, Dubai may well be the most significant COP since the Paris Agreement in 2015.” Initial analysis indicated the surrounding language was about as weak as it could be in the constellation of United Nations legal jargon, with phrasing that merely “calls on” countries to take action rather than pushing for it in stronger terms.

But it was still a major advance over an earlier draft, published Monday by the COP28 Presidency, that was dismissed as “unacceptable”, “incoherent”, “grossly insufficient”, and a “slap in the face” by angry, frustrated, and increasingly sleep-deprived delegates.

Ultimately, the final deal “could amount to a historic agreement as it addresses the impacts of polluting and harmful energy sources, and shapes a path towards energies that are safer and more reliable,” said Canadian Environment and Climate Minister Steven Guilbeault, who played a lead role in the talks. “The package is not perfect; no UN text is. But as someone who has been in this space for more than 20 years, I see a vision we can rally around.”

“What matters is the message this sends out to potential fossil fuel investors,” Climate Home News reporter Joe Lo wrote on social media. “In the previous text, you couldn’t say that governments had agreed to transition away from fossil fuels. Now I think you can.”“It is an enhanced, balanced—but make no mistake—historic package to accelerate climate action,” COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber said after delegates accepted the deal.

How a deal was done

Earlier, officials were working through the night in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, apparently closing in on a deal that would salvage two weeks of COP28 negotiations with compromise language pointing toward a phaseout of fossil fuels.

After the overwhelming response galvanized by the original decision text, “there’s been a change in tone at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai,” Bloomberg News reported. “The shift was suddenly palpable late Tuesday as top negotiators from Japan, Canada, Norway, UK, and the U.S. rallied together outside.” U.S. climate envoy John Kerry was grinning, and “within an hour, ministers were coming out again, describing progress in bridging a deep divide over the future of fossil fuels and plans for a new draft text in the early hours of the morning.”

COP28 CEO Adnan Amin told Bloomberg negotiators were on the cusp of a deal, Kerry said the discussions were “moving in the right direction,” and Canadian Environment and Climate Minister Steven Guilbeault said the emerging decision would “keep 1.5C within reach. I leave the meeting encouraged. Much more than yesterday.”

Bloomberg said it had seen a working draft of the eventual compromise text “that would call on nations to swiftly transition away from using fossil fuels,” while “steering clear of polarizing promises to ‘phase out’ fossil fuels that had drawn fire from Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing nations.” At that stage, the text was “more declarative than an earlier version released Monday evening, which didn’t commit countries to specific steps such as tripling renewable power and boosting efficiency.”

Crucially, Bloomberg recalled, the Monday draft referred only to steps countries “could” take to drive down emissions and speed up the energy transition. The new draft said nations “should” take those steps, a small shift in nuance that made a big difference in what one veteran COP observer had been calling “UN-speak”.

As overnight gave way to early morning in Dubai, there was some indication that discussion might have turned to the always-contentious area of international climate finance, though those essential details remained unaddressed as the COP concluded.

“Developing nations have long expressed frustration that the U.S. and other wealthy countries have not offered more aid to help them weather climate-fuelled disasters. Some poorer countries are also dependent on their fossil fuel reserves to boost national wealth, meaning a deal to phase out those fuels would slash their income,” Politico wrote. “Additional aid could be a carrot to persuade some holdouts to agree to the tougher language on the production and burning of coal, oil, and natural gas, by far the biggest sources of climate pollution.”

Guilbeault told media that wealthy nations “all recognize we need to do more when it comes to financing,” Politico said.

But negotiators from China, India, and other countries said they would not accept language on a fossil fuel phaseout or phasedown, Politico added.

“To tell us to stop fossil fuels is an insult. It’s like you are telling Uganda to stay in poverty,” the country’s minister of energy and mineral development, Ruth Nankabirwa, said on social media. Uganda would be open to “a long-term phaseout”, she added, but only if “developing nations can exploit their resources in the near term, while wealthy longtime producers quit first.”

This story first appeared in The Energy Mix. Read the original article here. 

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The new regulation, which broadly aligns with a similar effort in the United States, will eliminate the equivalent of 217 million tonnes of carbon dioxide pollution between 2027 and 2040 and deliver C$12.4 billion in “avoided global damages”, Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) said in a release. It’s meant to eliminate routine venting and flaring of natural gas, improve methane leak detection and repair, and address the risk of large methane releases.

“We’re seeing here the beginning of a global movement toward almost eliminating methane emissions from the oil and gas sector,” Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault told reporters in Dubai.

“As the world’s fourth largest oil and gas producer, we have both the responsibility and the know-how to do everything we can,” he added in the departmental release. “At this time of robust profit margins and high [fossil] energy prices, there has never been a better time for the oil and gas sector to invest in slashing methane emissions.”

“Great to see Canada taking strong action to achieve deep reductions in oil and gas methane emissions, just as the U.S. finalizes our own regulations,” said U.S. climate envoy John Kerry. “This is an essential strategy to limit warming to 1.5°C.”

Methane is a climate super-pollutant with 80 to 85 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide over the crucial 20-year span when humanity will be scrambling to get climate change under control. Earlier this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified fossil industry methane controls, alongside solar, wind, and energy efficiency deployment, as one of the cheapest ways to deliver faster, deeper emission cuts in this decade.

After signing on to the Global Methane Pledge two years ago during the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, Canada released a methane reduction strategy in September, 2022 that affirmed the 75% reduction from 2012 levels by decade’s end, Guilbeault’s department recalled in a backgrounder published earlier today. ECCC followed with a draft regulation two months later, then updated the draft in September, 2023.

The government is also moving to improve methane monitoring and support provincial action on methane through equivalency agreements with Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan, the backgrounder stated. And Ottawa earmarked $30 million for a new Methane Centre of Excellence to “improve our understanding and reporting of methane emissions, with a focus on collaborative initiatives to support data and measurement.”

Fossil fuel companies are also moving to get their methane emissions under control, ECCC said in its media release. Earlier in the COP, 50 of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies—none of them Canadian—announced voluntary commitments to reduce their methane emissions 80 to 90% by 2030.

But “voluntary action will never be sufficient,” Stephane Hallegatte Sr., a climate change advisor at the World Bank, told CBC. “Regulations are really, really important. You have to ask all oil and gas companies to check for those leaks. There are great new technologies to monitor leaks in real time and to act on them.”

Climate policy and campaign organizations attending COP28 applauded the federal announcement and urged Ottawa to get on with the job of finalizing the new regulations.

“The best way to fully eliminate methane pollution is by phasing out fossil fuel production,” Climate Action Network-Canada said in a release. “As momentum grows at COP28 towards a full, fair, and funded fossil fuel phaseout, Canada must use every tool at its disposal to reduce the enormous climate impact of its oil and gas industry.”

The new rules “represent a crucial and urgently required move towards a climate-resilient future,” said Tom Green, senior climate policy advisor at the David Suzuki Foundation. “Following a summer marked by destructive wildfires and extreme weather events, it is imperative that we hold the oil and gas sector accountable to achieve immediate methane reductions, which are often underestimated by 50% or more.”

“These new methane regulations can be an initial step toward setting and achieving an ambitious cap on overall greenhouse gas emissions from the oil and gas sector, on the path to a full, fast, and fair phaseout of fossil fuels,” said Greenpeace Canada Senior Energy Strategist Keith Stewart. “Given the consistent evidence of industry under-reporting methane emissions, it will be key to have independent monitoring and testing to ensure companies meet their obligations.”

“These regulations will position Canada as a leader on reducing methane pollution, but Canada should be striving for virtual elimination of methane emissions,” said Julia Levin, associate director, national climate at Environmental Defence Canada. “We urge the government to finalize and bring these regulations into force as quickly as possible.”

Cenovus Energy Chief Sustainability Officer Rhona DelFrari told CBC her company has cut its methane emissions 59% over three years, and is aiming for an 80% reduction from 2019 levels—a considerably easier benchmark than the 2012 reference year in the new federal standard—by 2028.

“Canada has a lot to be proud of in the oil and gas sector when it comes to our methane emissions reductions,” she declared. “We’re well, far ahead of many other countries around the world that are oil-producing jurisdictions.”

But the Alberta government, with a strong presence at COP28, was quick to condemn the federal announcement. “The federal government has unilaterally established new methane emissions rules and targets,” Premier Danielle Smith and Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz said in a joint statement, that called the regulations “illegal” and “unrealistic.”

“Given the unconstitutional nature of this latest federal intrusion into our provincial jurisdiction, our government will use every tool at our disposal to ensure these absurd federal regulations are never implemented in our province,” it concludes.

Today’s federal government backgrounder notes that the latest draft of the methane regulations factored in “extensive consultation on the development and design of the proposed regulations.” As for constitutional rights, Canada’s division of powers gives provinces authority over natural resources but establishes federal jurisdiction over pollution.

This story first appeared in The Energy Mix. Read the original article here. 

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On the opening day of the conference, delegates from nearly 200 countries adopted a draft framework to establish an international loss and damage fund, with the World Bank as its temporary host, Bloomberg News reports. The fund launches with US$260 million in pledges, including $100 million each from the UAE and Germany, $50 million from the United Kingdom, and $10 million from Japan.

Later in the day, the European Union came in with $250 million, including Germany’s share, followed by the United States at $17.5 million.

“This agreement is a vital first step towards ensuring communities get the support they desperately need—but stops short of the fund communities deserve,” said Tracy Carty, global political expert at Greenpeace International. “This COP must confirm that rich countries with the greatest contribution to climate change will lead the way. And that the fossil fuel industry, which continues to reap billions by exploiting fossil fuels, pays for the harm they have caused.”

“The progress made today at COP28 on loss and damage is a valuable step towards supporting people facing the devastating consequences of climate-fuelled disasters to recover and adapt,” agreed Chiara Liguori, senior climate justice policy advisor at Oxfam International. “However, much work remains to ensure the funding can truly benefit the communities most affected.”

But Adrián Martinez, director of La Ruta del Clima in Costa Rica, took a less optimistic view of what he cast as a “lost and damaged” funding mechanism. “A fund can be a functional financial mechanism but not promote justice, and this sums up the decision adopted today,” he said in a release. “Justice and dignity are not transactional, which is something parties and some NGOs have long forgotten at the UNFCCC.”

In the days leading up to the conference, COP watchers and delegates had hoped an early agreement on loss and damage would bring new momentum to a conference opening roiled by bombshell revelations that COP28 officials had sought to mix bilateral climate negotiations with oil and gas trade discussions on behalf of the summit’s host country, the UAE. COP28 President Sultan al Jaber is also the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC). And on Monday, the UK-based Centre for Climate Reporting and the British Broadcasting Corporation published details of COP28 briefing notes meant to be used in targeting nearly 30 countries for international oil trade deals during pre-COP discussions.

That news shared space earlier Thursday with the word that a loss and damage deal might be imminent. “If nearly 200 nations agree during the opening session on the fund’s hard-fought outline, that could remove a major source of acrimony from the conference agenda,” Politico reports. “From there, the United States and other rich countries will have to figure out how to find potentially hundreds of billions of dollars for island nations and other vulnerable communities.”

Show Us the Money

Loss and damage has been on the international climate agenda for decades, gaining urgency as the front-line impacts of climate change become ever more severe for the world’s most vulnerable countries. A framework agreement on loss and damage was the signature win at last year’s COP27 negotiations in Egypt, and after anxious debate over most of the last year, countries reached a compromise on how to manage a new international loss and damage fund in the weeks leading up to this year’s COP.

As an estimated 70,000 delegates gathered for this year’s COP, early reports identified at least three G7 countries, including Germany, that might be ready to make concrete pledges during today’s opening session, while climate hawks attending the conference in Dubai pushed Canada to be a “first mover” in support of the fund. In a published report this morning, climate diplomacy veteran Ed King said US$290 to $580 billion will be needed “to help countries smashed by extreme weather,” and developing countries are looking for $100 billion by 2030.

“What we do anticipate at this COP will be the announcement of a new fund around this, and that countries will be in a position to voluntarily provide funding,” a Canadian government official told media in a background briefing yesterday. “Member states have come together and I believe a conclusion to that negotiation is in sight. The deal seems to be holding.”

Al Jaber Denial

The CEO of one of those fossil companies, COP President al Jaber, was on the offensive yesterday, with forceful denials that he had ever seen or made use of the briefing notes revealed by the Centre for Climate Reporting and the BBC.

In the original news exposé, a spokesperson for the COP28 organizing team did not deny that business talks may have been combined with bilateral meetings related to the UN summit. Al Jaber “holds a number of positions alongside his role as COP28 President-Designate,” the spokesperson told the two news agencies. “That is public knowledge. Private meetings are private, and we do not comment on them.”

Al Jaber took a different tack Thursday morning. “These allegations are false, not true, incorrect and not accurate,” he told media, alleging that the news report was meant to undermine his COP28 presidency. “I promise you, never ever did I see these talking points that they refer to or that I ever even used such talking points in my discussions.”

“Do you think the UAE or myself will need the COP or the COP presidency to go and establish business deals or commercial relationships?” al Jaber added. “This country over the past 50 years has been built around its ability to build bridges and to create relationships and partnerships.”

BBC stood by an investigation that a spokesperson said “was rigorously researched according to highest editorial standards.” The broadcaster said it was not invited to al Jaber’s news conference.

The controversy triggered a hoax media release Wednesday, erroneously attributed to the COP28 secretariat, claiming that al Jaber had agreed to step down from his position as ADNOC CEO.

“Following ADNOC’s recent strategic announcements that are incompatible with several clauses of the Paris Agreement, concerns were raised by several parties inside the UNFCCC and from the advisory committee about the efficacy of Dr. al Jaber’s role as President Designate if he retains his affiliations to ADNOC,” the faux release said. It had al Jaber declaring that it’s time to “replace discord with solidarity”, bring transparency to climate negotiations, and “restore trust through united climate action”.

Fossil Era’s ‘Terminal Decline’

In opening remarks early Thursday, UN climate secretary Simon Stiell urged delegates to take their responsibilities seriously.

“If we do not signal the terminal decline of the fossil fuel era as we know it, we welcome our own terminal decline. And we choose to pay with people’s lives,” he said. “If this transition isn’t just, we won’t transition at all. That means justice within and between countries.”

Stiell put countries on notice that they’ll be expected to report back to next year’s COP with a transparent account of their climate action to date, then show up at COP25 with accelerated targets to reduce climate pollution and adapt to climate impacts.

“Every single commitment—on finance, adaptation, and mitigation—has to be in line with a 1.5°C world,” because “science tells us we have around six years before we exhaust the planet’s ability to cope with our emissions,” he declared. “Attending a COP does not tick the climate box for the year. The badges around your necks make you responsible for delivering climate action here and at home.”

This story was first published by The Energy Mix. Read the original article here. 

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Accelerate electrification

Electric vehicles and heat pumps are booming technologies that will help provide nearly one-fifth of the emission reductions by 2030. EVs should account for two-thirds of new car sales, while heat pump sales are already tracking ahead of the 20% annual growth rate needed through 2030 in some markets.

Slash methane emissions

The IEA calls this “one of the least-cost opportunities to limit global warming in the near term.” The energy sector needs to curb its methane emissions by 75% by 2030, which should cost it roughly US$75 billion, the equivalent of just 2% of the oil and gas industry’s net income in 2022 alone.

Double the annual rate of energy efficiency

Achieving this by 2030 will save the equivalent of all oil consumption in road transportation today. Besides more energy-conserving electric motors and air conditioners, countries need to drive the switch to clean cooking-fuel solutions as well as the more efficient use of energy and materials.

Triple renewable-energy capacity

This means getting global renewable capacity to 11,000 gigawatts by 2030. Authorities should speed up the permitting process for renewables such as solar and wind, extend and modernize electricity grids, tackle supply chain bottlenecks, and ensure that variable renewables are securely integrated.

Boost global investments

The world is forecast to invest a record US$1.8 trillion in clean energy in 2023. It’s a strong showing, but that needs to nearly triple by the early 2030s. Getting there hinges on mobilizing $100 billion in climate finance support for emerging and developing economies.

Put the brakes on new oil, gas or coal projects

The IEA suggests that fossil fuel demand must drop by more than 25% by 2030, and 80% by 2050, if we’re to meet net-zero. “Therefore there will not be a need for new investments in oil and gas fields or . . . coalmines,” said the IEA’s Fatih Birol. “This age of seemingly relentless growth is set to come to an end this decade.”

The post 6 ways global leaders can keep us on the road to net-zero appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In the face of such turmoil, the Caribbean has home-grown solutions that are building resilience and lowering emissions as it girds for fiercer storms: coral reef baskets to protect coastlines, sugarcane waste to create biofuel, recycled plastic to strengthen building blocks, or carbon-absorbing concrete made with saltwater.

But what it’s missing are greater pools of more equitable funding that help scale these projects and a recognition that the destructive changes it is suffering through are largely not of its making.

That’s part of the message that Racquel Moses, CEO of the Caribbean Climate-Smart Accelerator and a UN ambassador for net-zero, will be taking to the climate summit being held in Dubai starting this week. The gathering of global leaders will see the conclusion of the “global stocktake” – a major point of inflection in which countries see how far they have come in hitting climate targets, and where they are lagging behind. Scientists have warned that the world is not on track to limit global warming to 1.5°C – and is in fact charting a course to warm up by nearly double that amount this century. The window to take meaningful action is closing, the UN has cautioned.

For Moses, more of the discussion needs to focus on equitability.

She will be in Dubai hoping to drum up more financial support for projects that are underway or in the nascent stages. In 2009, the world’s richest countries committed to allocating $100 billion a year by 2020 to developing countries to fight climate change – a target that was finally met this year. Earlier this year, Caribbean leaders representing Small Island Developing States issued a call for more transparency and monitoring of the $100-billion “loss and damage fund”.

Moses says that her region needs access to more concessional funding, which has lower interest rates, as well as philanthropic funding to help carry the burden of hefty emissions-cutting mitigation or resilience-building preparedness projects. “We can’t continue to borrow our way out of a situation created by wealth that we do not have,” she says.

While the region is doing relatively better at reducing its emissions than other better-financed countries, most Caribbean nations are short of hitting their net-zero targets, Moses says. Financing is a big obstacle. “It is not a lack of skill or lack of expertise oftentimes. It is often a lack of bandwidth. We have one person wearing several hats versus having dedicated resources to many of these functions,” she adds.

While Caribbean countries can access funding from the World Bank and the International Development Bank, most are considered to be too wealthy to qualify for concessional funding. But their income level does not take into account their level of vulnerability to the changing climate, Moses notes.

“We shouldn’t all be required to be Haiti in order to access concessional finance to do things that our budgets just won’t allow us to do at this stage,” she says. Take Jamaica. It needs to raise its coastal roads because of sea-level rise and coastal erosion. That will cost it about US $1 million per kilometre, Moses says. “To ask Jamaica to raise their roads and to spend that money and to borrow money to do that, it’s unfair, it’s unjust,” she says. “The wealth that the carbon in the atmosphere has generated didn’t come to Jamaica. That went to Europe and the U.S. and China.” According to her organization’s calculations, Caribbean territories received roughly $7-billion in philanthropic funding between 2015 and 2021, with 75% of that going to Puerto Rico or U.S. Virgin Islands.

While the region has long sounded the alarm over these issues, it is speaking with a more unified voice now, Moses says.

K. Lisana Dyer, an environmentalist and resident of the Commonwealth of Dominica, a tiny island nation, will be among the region’s representatives at COP28, taking a message that underscores the injustice of the climate quagmire. “We’re very vulnerable when it comes to extreme weather events,” she says.

She says that while financing is an important topic, so too are the actions of the biggest countries. “Countries like Dominica emit less than 1% of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and yet still we suffer 100%. That’s not fair,” she says. “We need to reach to the root of the problem, where the large emitters reduce their emissions and reduce the negative impact.”

In Dubai, Moses’s team will be showcasing innovations such as an Interactive Caribbean Climate Map, which can connect philanthropists to projects that need funding in the region, along with mobile hydroponic farms that are building climate resilience. The “flex farms,” a partnership between Sony Music’s Global Social Justice Fund, the Caribbean Climate-Smart Accelerator and Wisconsin-based Fork Farms, are a super-charged form of growing produce, yielding 45 times more output than traditional farming methods in a 28-day time frame. It is a path for the island nations to become more food secure, using less water, less land and relying less on imports, Moses says.

There are a whole host of home-grown projects that have potential. One project in Barbados is using sugarcane waste from its production of rum to create biofuel. Another company in Costa Rica, founded by Canadian Donald Thomson, who has lived in the Central American nation for decades, is turning plastic waste into resin that strengthens concrete building blocks for housing or infrastructure projects. And a start-up by basketball legend Rick Fox out of Bahamas uses saltwater brine from desalination plants and steel slag waste to create a building material that absorbs carbon.

“What tends to happen in climate is that a lot of the Global North will come in and say, ‘We have a solution for this and for that,’ and we appreciate that outreach,” says Moses. “But we’re not the world’s customer. We also need to be participating in this marketplace.” Otherwise, she says, “we’re perpetuating this unfairness of climate change by not allowing these solutions the light of day.”

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But agriculture’s overall use of fossil fuels is also an enormous problem, according to a recent analysis by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. The report estimates that agriculture’s supply chain is responsible for at least 15% of the world’s fossil fuel use and for driving the equivalent annual carbon emissions of the European Union and Russia combined.  

This is thanks to the ways we produce, transport and store food. As is the case with many industries, fossil fuels are deeply entrenched in agricultural supply chains, from using combustion engine tractors to packaging foods in plastic wrapping. 

“Industrial food systems have a fossil fuel problem,” said Patty Fong, a program director at the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. “To prevent catastrophic climate breakdown, we need to urgently wean our food systems – alongside other economic sectors – off fossil fuels.” 

A 2021 study found that agriculture accounts for as much as a third of overall greenhouse gas emissions. These eyepopping estimates have led advocates of decarbonizing food systems to push for the issue to be central at December’s UN climate summit, COP28, in the United Arab Emirates. In a joint letter published in late October, in the run-up to the conference, 80 organizations and individuals (including the World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy and Environmental Defense Fund) called for action on food that goes beyond agricultural production (and includes the entire food supply chain).

“COP28 is a critical stepping stone in fixing our food systems and safeguarding food and nutrition security for people and humanity. Let’s seize this opportunity,” they wrote. 

And COP28 might emerge to be the most food-focused climate summit yet, as this year’s hosts have said they want to elevate the issue. But it remains to be seen whether governments will agree to the kind of transformational changes needed to make the way we eat more sustainable – especially given how ingrained fossil fuels are in food supply chains.  

Industrial food systems have a fossil fuel problem.

 

–Patty Fong, program director, Global Alliance for the Future of Food

And the fossil fuel industry wants to ensure that its piece of the agricultural pie continues to grow, according to the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. As the global energy transition picks up speed in transportation and heating, the alliance found that oil companies are “maneuvering to lock in” agriculture’s dependence on fossil fuels by investing in petrochemical products, such as plastic packaging for food and synthetic fertilizers. In 2018, the petrochemicals market accounted for 14% of oil production and 8% of natural gas production, and food-related fertilizers and plastics accounted for around 40% of these products, the alliance’s analysis says. The International Energy Agency projects the chemical sector will make up more than a third of oil demand by 2030.   

The alliance’s report maintains that untangling fossil fuels from food is an urgent task that will require a radical departure from the “continuing business-as-usual with incremental shifts” and a holistic look at every step of food production – from seed to fork.  

“Shifting away from fossil fuel dependency towards renewable energy and regenerative and agroecological farming would not only protect our planet, but make food more affordable, enhance food security, create jobs, improve health, and help tackle hunger,” Fong said. 

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In advance of this year’s COP28 climate summit, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) says that a steady phase-out of coal, oil and natural gas production is critical to put the world on a path to limit the increase in average global temperatures to 1.5 or even 2°C. 

The fourth annual Production Gap Report, released November 3, adds fuel to the heated debate in Canada surrounding the medium-term viability of the oil and gas industry’s plans to boost production and exports.  

At its release, UNEP and its partners in non-governmental organizations urged governments at COP28 to endorse a negotiated phase-out of fossil fuels. The phase-down should begin immediately, proceed urgently and be completed in the second half of this century, they said. Previous COPs have failed to address the production of fossil fuels. 

Canada isn’t alone in its climate contradiction.  

The 2023 Production Gap Report, released by UNEP, the Stockholm Environment Institute and other partners, found that 19 leading energy-producing countries are planning to extract twice as much fossil fuel supply in 2030 as the maximum that can be burned to keep the world on a 1.5°C track. Their production plans for 2030 would result in 70% more fossil fuel than the maximum limit for a 2°C pathway, the report says. 

Canada’s expectation with regards to higher production and exports of oil and gas to 2030 would put Canada in the top five countries in terms of increases over the next six years. And based on current emission– intensity levels, such fossil fuel production would be wholly inconsistent with Canada’s pledge to reduce overall emissions by 40 to 45% by 2030 and become a net-zero emitter by 2050, the UNEP report notes. 

At the global rate of fossil-fuel production and consumption, the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will wreak havoc on weather patterns and bring killer heat waves and droughts, severe flooding from rising sea levels and extreme rainfall, and rapid biodiversity loss. 

“The addiction to fossil fuels still has its claws deep in many nations,” UNEP’s executive director, Inger Andersen, writes in the forward to the report.  

“These [production] plans throw the global energy transition into question. They throw humanity’s future into question. Governments must stop saying one thing and doing another, especially as it relates to production and consumption of fossil fuels.” 

Much of the focus for climate mitigation –– in Canada and around the world –– has been on reducing demand for fossil fuels.  

Indeed, the International Energy Agency has said consumption of fossil fuels will likely peak this decade and would have to decline dramatically over the next 25 years if the world is to meet its stated climate goals.  

However, major increases in production would make progress more difficult by locking in additional fossil fuel infrastructure, increasing resistance among producing jurisdictions to the transition, and keeping prices low.  

“COP28 could be the pivotal moment where governments finally commit to the phase-out of all fossil fuels and acknowledge the role producers have to play in facilitating a managed and equitable transition,” says Michael Lazarus, a lead author on the report. 

Hopes for a consensus remain a long shot. COP28, which begins November 30, is being held in Dubai, in the oil- and gas-rich United Arab Emirates. Presiding over the summit will be Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, head of the Emirates’ state oil company, ADNOC.  

Al Jaber said recently the COP28 should reach an agreement to phase out “unabated” fossil fuels.   That’s a vague term used to defend the continued, and even increased, use of fossil fuels so long as it includes technologies to capture carbon emissions from large production facilities, power plants or industrial factories. 

For the Liberal government, the demands for a phase-out of fossil fuel production brings increased political headaches.  

Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault has said that governments at COP28 should endorse the phase-out of “unabated” fossil fuels, a characterization that drew criticism from both sides of the issue. While environmentalists slammed the limited commitment as wholly insufficient, Western premiers protested that it demonstrated Ottawa’s intention – as Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe put it on social media – “to completely shut down our energy sector.” 

COP28 could be the pivotal moment where governments finally commit to the phase-out of all fossil fuels.

 

– Michael Lazarus, lead author of the 2023 Production Gap Report

The Liberals are already on the defensive for watering down their carbon tax with a heating oil exemption for Atlantic Canada. 

Canada’s Constitution gives to the provinces the jurisdiction over resource ownership, management and production. Liberal ministers insist that their plan for a cap on oil and gas emissions is not aimed at production levels but rather at the industry’s carbon dioxide and methane emissions.  

Provincial governments and industry officials argue that the federal government’s target for a 42% reduction in oil and gas emissions by 2030 could be achieved only by shutting down some production. 

For Ottawa to endorse an unambiguous call to phase –out production would fan the political firestorm. Undertaking negotiations toward a gradual phase-out of production would undoubtedly provoke a constitutional challenge. 

Nor should governments rely on hopes for a massive increase in facilities that capture carbon either from emission streams or directly from the atmosphere to save us. Carbon capture and storage technology works only for large-scale facilities – not the millions of oil and gas wells that yield the global supply – and it will take decades and billions of dollars for the technology to be deployed at scale. 

Let’s be clear: UNEP and its partners are not suggesting the oil and gas industry be shut down in the short term. The target is 2050, and even then, they call for oil and gas production to be cut by 75%, with carbon capture and storage used on the rest.  

However, we urgently need to start the process to ensure we meet short- and medium-terms climate goals.  

COP28 should send a strong signal: for the sake of all global citizens and the species we share this planet with, the fossil fuel era must come to a timely end.  

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