UN climate talks agree to 'transition away' from fossil fuels

By SETH BORENSTEIN, DAVID KEYTON, JAMEY KEATEN and SIBI ARASU

Associated Press

Dec. 13, 2023 Updated 4:56 AM PT

DUBAI — Nearly 200 countries agreed Wednesday to move away from planet-warming fossil fuels — the first time they’ve made that crucial pledge in decades of United Nations climate talks, though many warned that the deal still had significant shortcomings.

The agreement was approved without the floor fight many feared — and is stronger than a draft floated earlier in the week that angered several nations. But it didn’t call for an outright phasing out of oil, gas and coal, and it gives nations significant wiggle room in their “transition” away from those fuels.

“Humanity has finally done what is long, long, long overdue,” Wopke Hoekstra, European Union commissioner for climate action, said. After nearly 30 years of talking about carbon pollution, climate negotiators in a key document explicitly took aim at what’s trapping the heat: the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.

Within minutes of opening Wednesday’s session, COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber gaveled approval of the central document — an evaluation of how off-track the world is on climate and how to remedy that — without giving critics a chance to comment. He hailed it as a “historic package to accelerate climate action.”

The document is the central part of the 2015 Paris agreement and its internationally agreed-upon goal to try to limit warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial times. The goal is mentioned 13 times in the document, and Al Jaber repeatedly called that his “north star.” So far the world has warmed by 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit since the mid-1800s.

Several minutes after Al Jaber rammed the document through, Samoa’s lead delegate, Anne Rasmussen, complained on behalf of small island nations that they weren’t even in the room when Al Jaber said the deal was done. She said that “the course correction that is needed has not been secured,” with the deal representing business-as-usual instead of exponential emissions-cutting efforts.

She said the deal could “potentially take us backward rather than forward.”

When Rasmussen finished, delegates whooped, applauded and stood, as Al Jaber frowned and then eventually joined the standing ovation that went on for longer than the one given his announcement. Marshall Islands delegates hugged and cried. Hours later, outside the plenary session, delegates from small island nations, European countries and Colombia held hands and hugged in an emotional show of support for greater ambition.

But there was more self-congratulation Wednesday than self-flagellation.

“I am in awe of the spirit of cooperation that has brought everybody together,” U.S. special envoy John F. Kerry said. He said it showed that multilateralism could still work despite conflicts such as the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. “This document sends very strong messages to the world.”

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement that “for the first time, the outcome recognizes the need to transition away from fossil fuels.”

“The era of fossil fuels must end — and it must end with justice and equity,” he said.

U.N. climate secretary Simon Stiell told delegates that their efforts were “needed to signal a hard stop to humanity’s core climate problem: fossil fuels and that planet-burning pollution. Whilst we didn’t turn the page on the fossil fuel era in Dubai, this outcome is the beginning of the end.”

Stiell cautioned participants that what they adopted was a “climate action lifeline, not a finish line.”

The new deal had been floated early Wednesday and was stronger than a draft proposed days earlier, but had loopholes that upset critics.

“The problem with the text is that it still includes cavernous loopholes that allow the United States and other fossil-fuel-producing countries to keep going on their expansion of fossil fuels,” said Jean Su, the Center for Biological Diversity’s energy justice program director. “There’s a pretty deadly, fatal flaw in the text, which allows for transitional fuels” — a code word for natural gas, which also emits carbon pollution.

The deal also includes a call for tripling the use of renewable energy and doubling energy efficiency. Earlier in the talks, the conference adopted a special fund for poor nations hurt by climate change, and nations put nearly $800 million in the fund.

The deal doesn’t go so far as to seek a “phase-out” of fossil fuels, which more than 100 nations had pleaded for. Instead, it calls for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade.”

German climate envoy Jennifer Morgan said the difference between “phase-out” and “transitioning away” could be seen as a positive: “I think the ‘phase-out’ was about sending a clear signal. And I think the ‘just transition away from’ is a way of phrasing the phase-out with the equity component included in it” for poorer nations that can’t act as quickly as richer ones.

Li Shuo of the Asia Society said when the two phrases are translated into Mandarin or Japanese, there is essentially no difference.

At a news conference, Kerry called it “a clear, unambiguous message on one of the most complicated issues that we face.” He said the U.S. wanted stronger language, but it was too much “of a steep climb” to get 195 nations to agree.

Kerry said that “there were times in the last 48 hours where some of us thought this could fail.” But “we stayed at it. People showed good faith. People stepped up.”

The deal says that the transition would be done in a way that gets the world to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in 2050 and follows the dictates of climate science. It posits the world’s carbon pollution peaking by 2025 but gives wiggle room to individual nations, such as China, to peak later.

It’s the third version presented in about two weeks, and the word “oil” does not appear anywhere in the 21-page document, but the words “fossil fuels” appear twice.

Former Vice President Al Gore, a Nobel Prize-winning climate activist, said that, while it was an important milestone “to finally recognize that the climate crisis is at its heart a fossil fuel crisis,” the deal was “the bare minimum,” with “half-measures and loopholes.”

“Whether this is a turning point that truly marks the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era depends on the actions that come next,” Gore said.