Each week subscribers to The Times can receive an environment-themed email newsletter. This one is about preparations for COP 28 in Dubai. It’s reproduced in full here with acknowledgement.
As we reach the halfway point between Cop27 and Cop28, the prospects for success at the summit in Dubai this December are looking increasingly uncertain. Yesterday marked the beginning of the Bonn conference, a ten-day meeting where climate negotiators will attempt to lay the groundwork for a wide-ranging agreement in Dubai.
Working groups at Bonn will try to resolve countries’ differences on a host of issues, ranging from how quickly developing countries should have to reduce their carbon emissions to how much developed countries should be paying them to help them adapt to climate change.
But the sheer difficulty of reconciling these competing demands was on display yesterday, when the assembled countries could not even agree to discuss the most central question of the climate change debate: how quickly everyone should be cutting their carbon emissions. A group of 24 developing countries, including China and India, refused the EU’s request to discuss the mitigation work programme – a project launched at Cop27 to find the most cost-effective ways to cut carbon emissions.
Harjeet Singh, the head of global political strategy at the Climate Action Network, is on the ground at Bonn. According to him, developing countries are reluctant to discuss cutting carbon emissions because they feel the developed countries are not giving them enough support to do so.
“If rich countries don’t do their fair share, the mitigation work programme is nothing but a tool to pressurise developing countries to do more without any assurance of support,” he says. “If you agree to carbon reduction targets without putting equity first, without the rich countries providing more finance, without ensuring technologies are available and accessible, who’s going to shoulder the burden the most? It’s the developing countries.”
The perception among developing countries that rich countries aren’t doing enough to help them has been a running theme of the Cop negotiations for three decades. But, according to Singh, there’s a new dynamic threatening to unravel the negotiations: the promotion of false solutions by Sultan Al Jaber, who is not only the incoming president of Cop28, but also the chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
Speaking in Berlin last month, Al Jaber said that the world needed to maintain “all sources of energy”, including fossil fuels in power plants and industry. He urged the world to scale up carbon-capturing technologies so that fossil fuels could be used more cleanly. As Singh sees it, Al Jaber’s paean to carbon capture was a “smokescreen”.
“We know that fossil fuels are the root cause of the problem and we have to phase out their use as fast as we can,” he says. “What he’s suggesting just prolongs the life of fossil fuels. There is no evidence of carbon capture working at a scale where it can actually reduce emissions. Currently, these technologies don’t even capture one per cent of our emissions. He is compromising the credibility of the UN process. If that happens, then how are we to trust the system?”
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Ben Cooke