COP28 reporting from climate justice sources
Oil Jabber heard in Dubai: Our top ten reasons to dismiss the Conference of Polluters 28
By Patrick Bond and Desmond D’Sa
The most publicised sentence from the final COP28 document – the first ‘Global Stocktake’ (GST), presided over by oil man Sultan al-Jaber and co-managed by South Africa’s environment minister Barbara Creecy – is this objective: “Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.
The term “transitioning away” is, though, full of weasel-word components.
1) The crucial point for host-country president al-Jaber and his supporters in the West, BRICS+ and OPEC countries was to not concede the need to “phase out“ gas, oil and coal. Hence, acknowledged UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell: “We didn’t turn the page on the fossil fuel era...,” because the only use of ‘phase’ (not ‘out’ but ‘down’) is in this objective: “Accelerating efforts towards the phase-down of unabated coal power.” That’s an implicit endorsement of ‘abated’ coal through (so-far unsuccessful, extremely expensive) ‘carbon, capture and storage’ technology.
2) One reason for the lack of progress on fossil fuel cuts was the “litany of loopholes” that small island states’ delegates complained about, including ‘abatement’ through unproven technologies and the ‘transitional’ use of methane ‘natural gas.’ But when methane leaks, the result is 80+ times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2 over a 20-year period. The COP28 thus violated the most basic reality, as articulated by Marshall Islands climate envoy Tina Stege: “1.5 is not negotiable, and that means an end to fossil fuels.”
3) The GST fully endorses gas – “transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security” – which in part reflects South Africa’s coming methane addiction, thanks to Creecy’s approvals of offshore gas exploration by TotalEnergies, Shell and others. And yet, schizophrenically, the agreement’s 18th clause “calls on Parties to contribute to… accelerating and substantially reducing non-carbon-dioxide emissions globally, including in particular methane emissions by 2030,” in part because of the critique of methane emissions from inside the UN, especially leaks. One region full of methane ‘super-emitters‘ is South Africa’s vast Mpumalanga Province coal field.
4) Profound climate injustice characterised the outcome, such as the ongoing refusal by the West and BRICS+ to admit polluter-pays liabilities, or the pitiable amounts provided to a Loss & Damage fund ($17.5 million from the worst-ever emitter, the United States) and to climate-proofing adaptation costs. Procedural justice was also violated, according to Samoa’s lead negotiator Anne Rasmussen, angered by Al Jaber: “You just gaveled the decisions and the small island developing states were not in the room. It is not enough for us to reference the science and then make agreements that ignore what the science is telling us we need to do.”
5) Even if there is a ‘breakthrough’ Loss&Damage fund, no matter how small (and run by the World Bank, the worst-ever greenhouse-gas financier), the UNFCCC offers no accountabilityand has allowed a long history of promises to be broken. The most crucial example of non-accountability was in June 2017 when Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the UNFCCC but faced no climate sanctions or punishment, a scenario likely to be repeated in 2025.
6) The highest-emitting bloc is the BRICS+ consisting of Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa plus new members Saudi Arabia, Iran, UAE, Egypt and Ethiopia – together responsible for 56% of global emissions based on producing only 28% of global GDP. Its October 2024 summit will be hosted by Vladimir Putin, and according to one of his leading officials, “Russia is satisfied with the results of this year’s climate talks… Moscow also welcomes the fact that the next climate summit will be held in Azerbaijan, another major oil producer and a part of the OPEC+ coalition.”
7) Creecy – co-chair (with Denmark) of the GST – celebrated because her main objective was to halt climate sanctions that will be imposed on products made with high-emissions energy: “We are also pleased to see that the final text takes a stand against unilateral measures (such as Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism). The decision emphasises that ‘unilateral measures should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade’.” That in turn will protect high-carbon exports from BHP Billiton aluminium and Arcelor Mittal steel smelters, mineral processing plants and deep mines run by transnational corporations, Sasol petrochemicals and the German-Japanese-U.S. auto makers which – as the core of the 27-member Energy Intensive Users Group – now guzzle 42% of South Africa’s scarce electricity while producing only 20% of GDP (while rapidly depleting non-renewable natural mineral resource wealth).
8) ‘False solutions’ are given new lease on life, because, according to CarbonBrief, “The GST also kicks the door wide open for expensive, niche and largely ineffective abatement technologies such as carbon capture and storage, blue hydrogen, carbon markets and geoengineering with negligible safeguards, and which will probably lead to further land grabs, water scarcity and deadly pollution for mostly Indigenous and other communities of colour.”
9) The crucial linkage between climate crisis and macroeconomic misery was utterly ignored, as the NGO DebtJustice observed: “The debt crisis was not adequately considered in the COP28 agreements. In the Global Stocktake, which informs countries’ climate action moving forward, debt is only referenced once, in relation to the need to scale up grant-based, non-debt creating climate finance (whereas previous versions had multiple sentences on this point). Despite referencing grant-based climate finance, there were no tangible commitments to secure this. While various texts mentioned the need for ‘fiscal space’, the impacts of the debt crisis and debt relief were not explicitly acknowledged, unlike the Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan from COP27.”
10) As British journalist George Monbiot points out, the “Cop28 was meant to be the first climate summit at which the impacts of the food system were properly considered. But by the time 120 meat and dairy lobbyists had done their worst, nothing meaningful came of it.”
Al Jaber is most famous for uttering his belief (just prior to the COP28) in increased oil and gas production, especially from the firm he runs, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company: “There is no science out there – or no scenario out there – that says the phase-out of fossil fuels is going to achieve 1.5C.”
The extent to which this fossil-addict bias infected the COP leaders was obvious to even the Associated Press: “al-Jaber walked out with what the United Arab Emirates wanted all along – the prestige of hosting negotiations that got the world to agree to transition away from fossil fuels while still being able to pump ever-more oil... The traditional Western nations held largely similar views, with U.S. envoy John Kerry staying close to al-Jaber in the months leading up the talks. The growing powers of China and India focused on ensuring their rise wouldn’t be curtailed through shutting off their coal-fired power plants. And the Gulf crude producers, led by neighboring Saudi Arabia, want to make sure their oil fields pump into the next generation to fuel their economic ambitions.”
Creecy has learned a great deal of progressive jargon, which – all evidence to the contrary – she used in her final assessment: “South Africa particularly welcomes the strong human rights, inclusive, and participatory approach in the decision to nationally defined just transitions, in which all stakeholders have a role to play and the right to development is respected. This is fundamental to the achievement of climate justice, at both the national and international level.”
But in reality, she has chosen sides: BRICS+ super-polluters and Western multinational corporations. One year from now, at the COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, things will continue to have degenerated, given the adverse balance of forces here and everywhere – unless activists amplify the pressure witnessed on December 8-9 in more than two dozen beach protestsagainst offshore gas extraction, and, in mid-2024, the South African electorate punishes planetary arson, among the many other sins of Creecy’s African National Congress.
Patrick Bond directs the University of Johannesburg Centre for Social Change and Desmond D’Sa directs the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance.
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/12/14/big_oil_wins_big_at_cop28
Big Oil Wins Big at COP28 in Dubai
December 14, 2023
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan
Ain Dubai, in English, The Eye of Dubai, is touted as the world’s largest Ferris wheel. The 820-foot tall wheel dominates the man-made island on which it rests. The massive, unblinking Eye permanently stares upon Dubai’s beachfront, its thicket of high rise luxury hotels and its marina, brimming with foreign-owned yachts. The Eye operated for only a few months before being abruptly shuttered in 2022. People can only speculate why, as the United Arab Emirates, the autocratic petrostate that governs Dubai, won’t say. One theory posits the wheel is slowly sinking into the sand, and that the structure, 25% heavier than the Eiffel Tower, will eventually topple, crushing the luxury residential high rises that surround it. The Eye thus stands as a glaring metaphor for humankind’s folly, trying to bend Nature to our will, and failing.
Across Dubai, Expo City is the sprawling facility where the UAE hosted COP28, this year’s annual summit of the three-decades-long global effort to tackle climate change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). All-night negotiations heated up as the two-week event neared its scheduled conclusion. Led by this year’s COP president, Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, the CEO of the UAE’s state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the gathered diplomats missed their Tuesday deadline, arguing over whether or not the final document would encourage a total “phase out” of fossil fuels or only the more mildly worded “phase down.”
In the end, the bleary-eyed negotiators used neither phrase, perhaps overwhelmed by the assembled army of petrostate representatives and 2,400 or more fossil fuel lobbyists. The final text promised, instead, the “[t]ransitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” Activists praised the first-time use of “fossil fuels” in a UNFCCC document. The climate activist group 350.org called it a “weak but welcome nod” in an otherwise “loophole-ridden text.”
As COP28 started, climate scientist Kevin Anderson predicted on social media, “This is a Cabal of Oil Producers not a climate COP. The outcome is known.”
Anderson didn’t attend COP28, in part because he won’t fly due to aviation’s global greenhouse gas emissions, but also because of his growing skepticism with the process.
“At every single level, the tendrils of Big Oil are changing our society and fundamentally changing our climate,” Anderson said on the Democracy Now! news hour, halfway through COP28. “These COPs have become little more than a scam under which the oil and other fossil fuel companies are hiding that nothing is being done.”
The outcome of COP28 includes a Global Stocktake, an assessment of how the world’s 200+ nations are doing eight years after the UNFCCC’s Paris Agreement was hammered out in 2015, with its aspirational goal of limiting global warming over pre-industrial levels to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
The loopholes mentioned by 350.org allow continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels. “Phasing out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies” is encouraged, which suggests that “efficient” fossil fuel subsidies exist, a point the climate divestment movement refutes. The document also claims that “transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition.” This clearly refers to methane, marketed by the industry as “natural gas,” which is many times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Then there is the issue of who is going to pay to move the global economy off of its dependence on fossil fuels.
“None of the transition is funded,” Asad Rehman, lead spokesperson for the Climate Justice Coalition, said from COP28 after the deal was finalized. “The idea of providing climate finance, public climate finance, that is really desperately needed, is being frittered away. Instead, the only mentions of finance are about private capital.” To attract the vast sums needed, Rehman says, “you’re lowering environmental standards. You’re lowering workers’ rights standards. You make your economy much more attractive to private capital…so now the responsibility has fallen on developing countries to guarantee profit. It’s utter madness.”
COP29, next year’s summit, will be in Baku, Azerbaijan, another repressive petrostate. Human Rights Watch reported on December 5th, “A new wave of repression in Azerbaijan is targeting foreign-funded independent media as well as journalists who criticize the government and expose high-level corruption.” Six journalists were arrested.
Petrostates like the UAE and Azerbaijan play predictable roles in protecting the status quo, but it’s the world’s biggest petrostate that brandishes the most power inside the COPs: the United States. As the largest producer and exporter of fossil fuels, and as the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gasses, the US bears the most responsibility for the climate crisis. While negotiations move from the shifting sands of Dubai with its sinking Eye to Azerbaijan, what people demand of their elected leaders, here in the United States, matters around the world.
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Greta Thunberg slams COP28 deal as ‘stab in the back’ for nations most hurt by climate change
Thunberg says deal not nearly close to being sufficient to limit warming
Thomson Reuters · Posted: Dec 15, 2023 11:59 AM EST | Last Updated: December 15
Greta Thunberg blasts ‘toothless’ COP28 text
Climate activist Greta Thunberg is criticizing the COP summit system, saying if the annual climate conferences actually prompted change, ‘we would have seen results bynow.’
The COP28 climate deal reached with huge fanfare this week in Dubai is a stab in the back for the nations most affected by global warming and won’t stop temperatures rising beyond critical levels, activist Greta Thunberg said on Friday.
Nearly 200 countries agreed at the summit to begin reducing global consumption of fossil fueland adopt a raft of measures, including more clean energy production, to avert the worst effects of climate change.
But critics say the deal will not prevent global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average, which scientists say will trigger catastrophic and irreversible impacts, from melting ice sheets to the collapse of ocean currents.
“This text is toothless and it is nowhere even close to being sufficient to keep us within the 1.5-degree limit,” Thunberg told Reuters outside Sweden’s parliament where she and a handful of other protesters were calling for climate justice.
“It is a stab in the back for those most vulnerable.”
‘An alibi’ for world leaders: Thunberg
The Alliance of Small Island States, which includes countries most affected by climate change like Fiji, Tuvalu and Kiribati, said the agreement was full of loopholes and was “incremental and not transformational.”
Thunberg, 20, who shot to fame as the face of climate activism in 2018 after she started staging weekly protests in Sweden, said the pact was not designed to solve the climate crisis but as “an alibi” for world leaders that allowed them to ignore global warming.
“As long as we don’t treat the climate crisis as a crisis and as long as we keep lobby interests influencing these texts and these processes, we are not going to get anywhere,” she said.
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https://newrepublic.com/article/177536/cop-28-un-climate-talks-poorer-nations
December 13, 2023
The U.N. Climate Talks Hung Poorer Nations Out to Dry
Nearly 200 countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels, but the U.S. and others are actually expanding oil and gas exploration while refusing to finance the transition for poorer countries.
On Wednesday morning in Dubai, as U.N. climate talks stretched well into overtime, COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber left no room for comments as he rammed throughthe final version of a text widely understood as the main prize of this year’s negotiations. The Global Stocktake—a framework for meeting the audacious goals of the Paris Agreement—includes two little words that never appeared in that prior document: fossil fuels.
Ironically, some of the countries that were most adamant about including calls for a “phaseout” of fossil fuels in the Global Stocktake are also those planning to increase their extraction of fossil fuels the most. The United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Norway are responsible for the majority of planned expansion of new oil and gas fields through 2050. All cheered Wednesday’s deal as a key step to “keep 1.5 alive,” referring to the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). But the final text doesn’t reference a phaseout of fossil fuels—only “transitioning away” from them “in a just, orderly and equitable manner.”
“People who don’t know better think this is ambitious,” said Meena Raman, head of programs at the Third World Network, a Malaysia-based nongovernmental organization that closely tracks U.N. climate proceedings. “They come here and talk about ‘keeping 1.5 alive’ while they continue to expand fossil fuel production,” she added, referencing wealthy oil and gas-producing countries in the global north. “It’s a big con on the part of the developed world.”
As Raman and many others have pointed out, the final text includes several “escape routes” for continued fossil fuel production. Among those is a formal recognition that “transitional fuels,” principally methane gas, “can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security.” There’s also little clarity on how low- and middle-income countries are meant to finance a transition away from coal, oil, and gas. References to richer countries taking the lead in providing that support were largely watered down in the final version, which emphasizes courting funds from the private sector and multilateral development banks.
“Not only has the finance not been delivered by developed countries, but they’ve been trying to weaken their obligation to provide that finance,” Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns at ActionAid USA, told me yesterday before the last version of the Global Stocktake had been released. “The U.S. is trying to remove all references to developed countries and to saying they have to be the ones to provide finance.”
Climate justice advocates I spoke with see the U.S. and other global north countries’ ultimately failed push for phaseout language—absent concrete plans or financial support—as, at least in part, a cynical attempt to divide developing countries against one another and advance their own interests.
The G77 plus China has been a powerful negotiation bloc in recent years, having just won a dedicated fund to help countries recover from climate disasters. Establishing that fund meant overcoming years of obstruction from the U.S., in particular. The coalition, though—now 134 countries—is a heterogeneous group that includes the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations and some of its biggest fossil fuel exporters. U.S. media coverage of the fossil fuel phaseout debate at COP28 has largely framed it as a battle between members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries—which opposed that language—and the U.S., which has aligned itself on this issue with low-lying island nations that face an existential threat from continued warming.
“This has been a usual tactic from their playbook to divide and conquer: Ask vulnerable countries to demand more action from developing countries without offering any money,” Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at Climate Action Network International, told me.
Many countries had demanded that language about an energy transition also include committing additional funds to help make it happen. “Any agreement concerning the phasing out of fossil fuels, and any moratorium on new investments in fossil fuel production, must be applied equitably,” the African Group of Negotiators wrote in its contribution to the Global Stocktake.
Like the Paris Agreement itself, the Global Stocktake is a nonbinding agreement. It will be realized mainly through countries updating their own emissions-reduction pledges. There’s very little to keep countries who’ve pushed language about a fossil fuel phaseout from phasing in a good deal more of them. Without real financial commitments, moreover, transitioning away from fossil fuels will be nearly impossible for poorer countries. A spokesperson for the U.S. delegation to COP28 did not respond to repeated requests for comment as to how it intended to transition away from fossil fuels or help poorer countries do the same.
“How can a developed country say with a straight face that ‘1.5 is our overriding priority,’ when they’re the ones who have blown the budget for 1.5, and are continuing to blow it with fossil fuel expansion plans? They’re pushing,” Wu added, “for words on paper that don’t match the action that they’ve taken.”
An energy transition will be especially difficult for countries staring down onerous debt burdens. Just 42 countries have doubled their governmental, corporate, and household debt over the last decade and now carry a combined load of $3.5 trillion. In Nigeria—an OPEC member—debt payments of $7.5 billion exceed government revenues by $900 million.
“The energy transition cannot be just, equitable, or fair if it isn’t funded. Developed countries who are responsible for historical emissions must not only take the lead in reducing current emissions but also provide the adequate climate finance that developing countries need,” Ubrei-Joe Maimoni Mariere, of the Nigerian NGO Environmental Rights Action, wrote in a statementabout the end of the talks. “Without finance, the so-called ‘just transition’ put on the table here at COP28 won’t deliver the long-term transformation that is needed in my country, Nigeria, and across Africa.”
According to the U.N. Commission on Trade and Development, about half the world’s population lives in places where debt payments exceed spending on education and health care. The Federal Reserve’s commitment to keeping interest rates higher for longer has worsened that picture. That also makes countries all the more eager to exploit fossil fuels that can be sold off for much-needed U.S. dollars. Multilateral development banks often encourage countries to drill for fossil fuels in exchange for desperately needed funds. As part of its aid package to Argentina—which increased by $7.5 billion this past summer—the International Monetary Fund is directly supporting the development of the country’s massive Vaca Muerta oil and gas fields with the aim of boosting exports.
Colombia—Latin America’s fourth-largest oil producer—is finding out in real time how difficult it is to transition off fossil fuels, as the country’s recently elected left-wing president, Gustavo Petro, has pledged to do. “When our president said he will not sign any new coal or oil contract,” Colombian environment minister Susana Muhamad noted during informal talks in Dubai on Monday, “the peso devalued the next day. Credit rating agencies downgraded us. How do we repay our debt? How do we deal with these kinds of contradictions?”
Many more oil- and gas-producing countries will have to follow Colombia’s lead to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. The annual Production Gap Report, released last month by the U.N. Environment Program and several other groups, found that the world is on track to produce 110 percent more fossil fuels than is consistent with keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. With COP28, world leaders have finally agreed to call fossil fuels a problem they have no plan for solving.
Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at The New Republic.
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http://www.cadtm.org/COP28-Dubai-The-Other-Side-of-the-Story
COP28 Dubai: The Other Side of the Story
14 December by Farooq Tariq , Zaighum Abbas
A two-member delegation of the Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee—a member of the Asian People’s Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD)—attended the 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) held in Expo City, Dubai. The final agreement is termed by international media as a “historic accord on the transition away from fossil fuels.” However, the reality is far from it.
The announcement of “cutting emissions instead of a total phase-out of fossil fuels” is a retreat from the achievements made earlier. It is a step back from COP27. This shift is attributed to COP28 being chaired by a person who was the head of the United Arab Emirates national oil company. Many movements and civil society organisations have pointed out that, in terms of making progress towards decarbonisation, we have actually gone backward. The language in the current text on fossil fuels is considered worse than what we had in the last two COPs.
While the last two COPs to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change committed to the “phasedown of unabated coal power and the phaseout of insufficient fossil fuel subsidies,” The COP28 final text did not refer to a “phaseout” of fossil fuels. Instead, it listed eight options that countries could use to cut emissions.
Another critical point is that developing countries, including Pakistan, which was at the forefront of advocating for the “phase-out of fossil fuels,” are themselves the largest fossil fuel consumers with the most extensive oil, gas, and coal expansion plans. An example is the expansion of coal-based power plants in Pakistan. With 21 thermal independent power producers, fossil fuel-based energy in Pakistan constitutes almost 60 percent of the total (32.3 percent gas-based, 12.8 percent coal-based, and 14.3 percent oil-based), and the government shows no plan to reduce it, instead promoting local coal-based power generation. This hypocrisy is mirrored in other developing countries demanding fossil fuel phase-out while pushing fossil fuel-based energy at the core of their national production.
COP28 also failed to pledge the amount necessary for the Loss and Damage Fund (LDF). Although the LDF was established, the pledge to make the full and complete Green Climate Fund amounted to a mere total of US$ 725 million, falling short of the famous 2020 pledge of US$ 100 billion. According to The Guardian, the pledged amount to the Loss and Damage Fund will cover less than 0.2 percent of the estimated $387 billion per year needed to finance interventions to mitigate climate change. This was a total loss to developing countries, including those at the centre of climate disasters like Pakistan.
The debate on climate finance has been the centre point and centre stage of this year’s COP28. The central tenet of Loss and Damage is that not everyone is equally responsible for or impacted by climate crises. Wealthy nations, historic polluters, should be required to provide finance for poorer climate-vulnerable nations like Pakistan on the front lines of environmental breakdown. There was no mention of the US$ 10.7 billion pledges from international financial institutions, donor agencies, and development partners for the rehabilitation, recovery, and reconstruction of the flood-affected areas at the Geneva International Conference on Climate Resilient Pakistan, hosted by the UN and Pakistan on January 23, 2023. The fact is that 90 percent of flood victims have not been rehabilitated despite a year and a half gone, inequalities are on the rise, and 20 million “new poor” are added.
The COP28 negotiations did not address the link between climate vulnerability and debt in developing countries, despite a projected global debt of $97 trillion in 2023. A recent report shows 54 countries facing a debt crisis, with external debt payments by the Global South increasing by 150% since 2011. Pakistan’s external debt reached 128.1 bn in September 2023, rising by 29% in the fiscal year 2023. ActionAid International’s research reveals that 93% of the most climate-vulnerable nations, including Pakistan, are overwhelmed by debt. Instead of debt cancellation, international financial institutions increased pressure on Pakistan, leading to higher indirect taxes on ordinary citizens rather than taxing the rich.
The shining part of COP28 was the unity among civil society organisations demanding an immediate ceasefire in Palestine, no fossil fuels, debt cancellation, and no climate justice without human rights, gender rights, and indigenous rights. Every day, dozens of demonstrations inside the venue raised voices on these critical issues. The COP28 administration allowed these demonstrations with many restrictions. No flags, no naming of countries, and no direct accusations. Despite that, Palestine was the focal point of all the restricted demonstrations and rallies. There were huge cries for a ceasefire. The rally on December 9 was historic; Dubai, which has allowed no demonstration in its territories by anyone, has never seen thousands marching and demanding climate justice and a ceasefire. The UN-administered area of the COP28 venue saw hundreds of banners, chants of slogans, and charged participants of this historic rally, which went around the venue till the gate of the Green Zone. Farooq Tariq was one of the main speakers at the end of the rally, along with several others representing different constituencies. The PKRC was able to raise strong voices on burning issues such as debt and fossil fuels.
On December 10, on the International Day of Human Rights, Farooq Tariq from the Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee raised the issue of migrant labour in Dubai and other Middle Eastern countries. “We demand equal human rights for all migrant workers, who are the backbone of the development in these areas; they are treated like second-rate citizens, have no equal wages, no health and safety, no proper labour rights, and can never be local citizens”, he added.
Some of the civil society activists, including the PKRC, were able to hold a unique demonstration at the press conference of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on December 11. Eleven civil society activists held a banner, “Hold the Line,” inside the venue, attracting huge media attention. “Hold the Line” referred to not crossing the 1.5 Celsius and urging the UN chief to take a strong position on that.
Another positive aspect was the initial attention of the commercial media to the demonstrations and press briefings of civil society activists holding banners and chanting slogans, something never seen in the territory of the UAE. By the end of COP28, the commercial media was silent about the daily demonstrations inside the venue; however, the purpose of world attention towards the fossil-free world was achieved.
It is now time for a total phase-out of fossil fuels—fast, fair, and forever. The words “fossil fuels” in the text are meaningless if the rest of those pages are riddled with loopholes that not only enable but exacerbate the era of fossil fuels. Climate action is weakened if those who are most responsible are not held accountable to lead by example. A phaseout is useless without the tools needed to actually achieve it. Climate action is pointless if it condemns billions to death and destruction.
Farooq Tariq is the General Secretary of the Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee, a network of 26 peasant organizations and a coalition member of the international platform La Via Campesina.
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December 15, 2023
COP28–Doing Less While Pretending to Do More
by Mel Gurtov
Following the Script
International conferences almost always fall well short of meeting ambitious reform goals because the large number and variety of participants ensure hard bargaining over policy ideas and details. The annual COP28 meetings in Dubai, UAE, are no different, but their chances of breaking new ground for dealing with climate change are further reduced by the conference’s leadership.
The chairman, Sultan Al Jaber, heads the UAE’s state oil and gas company. His comment at the conference that “there is no science out there . . . that says the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5 degrees C.,” showed where he stands—and where the fossil fuel industry as a whole wants to center discussion. Days after he said that, news media carried the story that the 1.5 degree threshold, beyond which climate catastrophes loom, will probably be passed this year.
COP28 follows the script of previous conferences.
The UN, represented by Secretary-General António Guterres, opens with a plea for saving the planet from an immediate threat. Everyone present professes worry, but when the parties get down to outlining agreements, the goodwill fades, replaced by self-interested demands.
Thus, when Guterres, in response to Al Jaber, said that phasing out fossil fuels, “with a clear time frame,” is essential to fighting climate change, he could expect no support from industry, much less from individual governments. In fact, OPEC declared during the conference that its members will block any proposal aimed at reducing fossil fuel use.
As the New York Times is reporting, Saudi Arabia and Aramco, the state-owned oil company, are the leading obstructionists at COP28, refusing to entertain any discussion about phasing out fossil fuels. They see “phasing out” as a death wish for their revenue stream.
A Bit of Progress, Maybe
COP28 has had a few redeeming features. Reportedly, the 50 biggest fossil fuel companies have together agreed to eliminate methane emissions from their drilling and production work. If they fulfill that pledge, it will be a big deal, since methane is far more destructive to the environment than carbon dioxide.
Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, says:
“If those promises are met, it’s got the potential to cut temperatures we would otherwise see within the next decade … more than anything agreed to at prior COPs, more than anything I’ve seen in my entire career over 30 years. There’ve been a lot of pledges made at COP that have never been fulfilled. We feel like we have to set up a robust accountability system.”
We’ll see.
Also potentially important is a new fund set up specifically to address loss and damage to developing countries from climate change. This took years of negotiations. Rich countries have pledged $655.9 million into the fund so far, although hundreds of billions of dollars are needed per year. The value of the fund will depend on whether or not local communities, not just central governments, actually receive the money. After all, the damage to economies is mostly at the local level, where homes have been wiped out and residents have no way to rebuild.
The Unavoidable Necessity
The central problem remains governments that don’t meet their responsibilities and fossil fuel companies that don’t fulfill their promises. Carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels is expected to rise by 1.1 percent in 2023 compared with 2022, scientists found in a new study.
Researchers from the Global Carbon Project, which produces the study annually, announced the results at COP28. “Just supporting renewables alone is not going to solve the climate problem,” said Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Oslo and one of the 121 authors of the report. “You have to have policies that are ensuring that fossil fuels actually go down,” just as Secretary-General Guterres said.
The COVID years produced a measurable decrease in carbon emissions, but that has proved to be misleading. Rising carbon emissions is the rule, led by China (more than four percent increase expected this year) and India (more than eight percent).
Fossil fuel use has declined in the US, Japan, Brazil, and the European Union, but those countries together represent only 28 percent of carbon emissions from fossil fuel use. Unless all countries are decarbonizing together, experts say, we’ll never stop the carbon buildup. (BTW, the US has nothing to crow about; It is now second only to Saudi Arabia as an oil exporter and producer.)
Among the measures proposed for dealing with the problem is an old one: Give developing countries the resources to adopt renewable energy counterweights to climate change. But that leaves China out, since it really isn’t a poor developing country and has plenty of money to move away from fossil fuels.
China is doing that to some degree, but it remains heavily reliant on coal. And new coal-firing plants are still being built, contrary to Xi Jinping’s assurances. (In fact, a new report points out that China’s coal mines are an important source of methane.)
When 118 governments pledged at Dubai to triple renewable energy and double energy efficiency worldwide while reducing fossil fuel use, China (and India) abstained. These moves by China undermine another promise Xi made: that China would achieve net-zero in carbon emissions by 2060. No way—and no wonder Xi just said that China would not release its national carbon emission targets for 2030 and 2035 until 2025.
COP28 will no doubt end with a common statement of intent to do more, using language designed mainly to obscure serious differences. But again, as in past conferences, mechanisms will not be put in place to hold the parties to their pledges and provide oversight of actual carbon-fighting efforts.
That’s why we rely so heavily on environmental activist groups and individuals; they are doing the job others refuse to take on.
Mel Gurtov is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University, Editor-in-Chief of Asian Perspective, an international affairs quarterly and blogs at In the Human Interest.
***
End Cop: Aren’t We All Fed Up With This Annual Vapid Self-Congratulatory Farce?
By Rupert Read
December 14, 2023
So the endgame of Cop28 has ended. What did we get?
The much-vaunted highlight is the text actually stating the obvious. Which, admittedly, has never happened before.
The real danger of the way CoP28 ended with a ‘positive’ outcome is that it makes it seem as if something has been achieved. Whereas all that has been achieved, after 28 years, is a toothless statement of the obvious: that we need to transition away from fossil fuels.
So the size of it is that it has only taken delegates 28 years to actually mention the source and scale of the much-more-than-problem.
Well whoop-y-doop. At that rate, by 2051 maybe they will agree a (non-binding) pledge to phase out fossil fuels…
My great colleague Bill McKibben famously says that winning slowly on climate is the same as losing. Well, this sure is the quintessence of SLOWLY!
What that is concrete, that actually means something, has come out of this CoP? Well, nothing. Only a few more unbelievable, unenforceable voluntary pledges. (There was that early success on loss and damage – but even that achievement melts almost into thin air when one actually scrutinises it.)
Should I be kinder to this agreement? After all, there is, famously, some reasonably decent novel language in the agreement they managed to reach at CoP28, language that speaks of “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems”. Good. But look closer: “in energy systems”. What do they mean by this slightly odd, rarely used phrase? It is not interpreted in the agreement. Which in this crucial sense is therefore deliberately ambiguous.
The most plausible interpretation – the one that will certainly be in the minds of the likes of Sultan Jaber – is that they mean power (I.e. power-stations) and heat (as in for instance combined heat-and-power plants, or home-heating). I.e. “Energy systems” mean the generation of electricity and of heating. So let’s be clear: CoP28 did NOT even actually ‘call on’ countries to transition away from fossil fuels. They only called on countries to transition away from fossil fuels in the generation of electricity and of heat for heating purposes. (This helps explain the otherwise-odd way in which the key part of the agreement is constructed: talking about achieving full transition in ‘energy-systems’ and then going on to speak about having more EVs etc, without asserting that there must be a full transition away from petrol cars etc.)
CoP28 did not ‘call on’ countries to transition away from fossil fuels in their use in transportation, and certainly did not call on them to effect such transition in heavy industry (eg chemicals or steel production), or in the food system. Only in the production and transmission of ‘energy’: I.e. basically electricity (plus heating).
And there is in any case a big loophole left for the continued use of fossil gas as a ‘transition fuel’, and for the unicorn of ‘carbon capture and storage’.
(And why did I scare-quote the phrase “call on”, above? To draw attention to how weak this term is. There is no legal insistence here. Countries are merely invited to try to do something.)
Let us put the matter bluntly and clearly. This just is not the breakthrough that some are inadvisedly and rather desperately trying to convince themselves (and the less well-informed) that it is. It is a loophole ridden, small, merely rhetorical advance, without teeth.
CoP in anything like its present form has, inevitably, categorically failed us and is never going to effectively deal with this more-than-emergency.
The most powerful, transformative thing that CoP delegates could do as they leave Dubai and trail home is to admit – to proclaim – exactly this.
They need to do so, to counter the impression that the CoP PR machine is giving: that this is summit has been a success that has put the world on the path to salvation. On the contrary. This is yet another power-less sticking plaster. A mere rhetorical flourish.
The CoP system is moribund. It needs to end.
What is actually needed is smaller, nimbler, bolder coalitions of the willing, collaborations of countries (and businesses, and other entities) willing to go much further toward what actually needs to be done, if we are to have a future.
Meanwhile, in lieu of that, we in the Climate Majority Project (CMP), seeking to help represent the majority who want real climate action and are determined to bring it so long as governments and diplomacy continue to fail us, are working on an alternative ‘bottom up’ approach that could really get somewhere. The ‘Regulate Us’ campaign we are now beginning is actually much stronger as a prospect for making real progress on climate than anything coming out of Dubai. Our view is that business, the most powerful force in our neoliberalised world, can conceivably switch from being merely self-interested to becoming a force for good – if it turns to seeking to force governments to provide it with a decent regulatory and policy environment.
Because governments are not going to lead; they need to be led, by lobbies (and voters) who get it.
I am not asserting that business can fix this, through the ‘magic of the market’ or through the ESG agenda. Far from it! The greatest power that business and finance now has, I would argue, is to confess its own powerlessness to ‘fix’ the desperate climate situation. This would be a true man-bites-dog moment: when business, the ultimate positive ‘can-do’ force in society, precipitates change by facing up to its own incapacity to bring sufficient change about.
Business’s lobbying-strength is more important than its self-starting reductions of scopes 1-3 emissions. Business’s true power now is to admit it can’t solve this by itself, but to lean on governments to actually start to move to do so.
Business and finance could then effect a historic shift:
From the norm being that businesspeople look for self-interested regulatory loopholes, taxbreaks, and quick bucks to the norm being that they lobby together to have a future in which they can do business without being driven to the bottom by the short-termistic and unenlightenedly selfish.
(The same goes, incidentally, for AI, and in fact for all existential threats. In AI as with climate, the only way to prevent things spinning further and further out of control is for business to insist upon government acting to prevent uncontrolled escalation of AI across the piece.)
We don’t tend to think of businesspeople and big financial interests as powerless; they certainly don’t like to think of themselves that way! But, much as civil society in 1980s Eastern Europe spoke the taboo truth about the failing regimes there and so paved the way for the tipping point of 1989, so now civil society, including the part of it governments these days really tend to listen to — business and financial interests — needs to do the same vis a vis the climate more-than-emergency and the deep failure of nations and CoPs alike to address it even remotely adequately.
A transformation along the lines that I have been sketching is not about to be brought in at the coming general election. That just shows how the transformation that is required is going to take a little longer than that, and is going to need the tectonic plates of politics to shift. We in the CMP believe it is business that can shift those tectonic plates.
Furthermore, the process of such shifting can happen stepwise; there are steps (eg a Better Business Act; an Ecocide Law) that can be taken along the way to an economy that adequately prices carbon and so looks very different from our current one.
So, to sum up: now that CoP28 has dribbled to its false-positive end, the terrifying question facing us all is whether humanity is now facing its endgame. This civilisation certainly is.
If this civilisation is going to manage to morph into something that can survive, then that is going to need a dramatic change on the part of business. Stepping into its full power, which happens to be what Vaclav Havel famously called the power of the powerless. Any business that is serious about being green / progressive / compatible with us having a future (and remember: no profits on a dead planet!) needs to demand of governments, “Regulate us, for the common good.” Because governments are not going to move until their chief lobbyists and paymasters do. And they – business and high finance – cannot do this by themselves. They cannot become sustain- able without significant help: a levelled-up, raised playing field; rules set by the national and international rule-setters. The mind-set of business is invariably a positive ‘can-do’ spirit. It is immensely challenging to the self-image of business to admit that this predicament, the climate crisis, is just too big for them to deal with by themselves. But it is.
Business admitting this, and starting to force governments to step up in a way that they cannot do through the lowest-common-denominator CoP process, is the one credible way that we actually start to get somewhere. Faster. As we must, if we are not to go the way of the dodo.
The tragedy of the outcome at Dubai is that it will be spun as a excuse to put off what needs to happen: the CoP system needs to end. And all the energy that gets pointlessly poured into it needs to get invested instead into smarter, wiser efforts – diplomatic, political, and more, from citizens and business leaders upwards – to achieve a future.
***
Indigenous people and climate justice groups say Cop28 was ‘business as usual’
Developing countries call agreement to transition away from fossil fuels ‘unfair’ and ‘inequitable’
Nina Lakhani Climate justice reporter
Wed 13 Dec 2023 17.59 GMT
As the leaders of the developed world hailed the Cop28 agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels as historic, Indigenous people, frontline communities and climate justice groups rebuked the deal as unfair, inequitable and business as usual.
The global stocktake (GST) – and the entire UN talks – were dominated by whether or not agreement could be reached to phase out or phase down fossil fuels in order to curtail global heating.
Many developed countries publicly pushed hard for a phase-out of coal, oil and gas, but with caveats such as “unabated” or just coal, in the case of the US. In contrast, many in the developing world – despite their desire to see global temperatures limited to 1.5C (2.7F) above pre-industrial levels – consistently said that any commitment to move away from fossil fuels must be “fair, funded, and fast”, with the rich polluting countries transitioning first. In the end, rich countries with large oil and gas reserves were the clear winners.
The final deal fails to recognise the historic responsibility of the developed countries such as the US, UK, Canada and EU, which got rich by burning fossil fuels and are therefore most responsible for climate breakdown. Separate but connected to this issue of differentiated responsibility is the means of implementation: the obligation of developed countries to shoulder the burden and help developing countries to tackle and adapt to the climate crisis. Both are missing from the GST, which means the final deal lacks equity, according to climate justice advocates.
“Yet another disgraceful Cop where the wealthy polluters arrogantly shirk their responsibility, abandoning any pretence of fairness or justice,” said Wanun Permpibul, of Climate Watch Thailand. “They parade as climate champions, while our people and communities in the global south suffer the fallout of a crisis we did not create.”
Bareesh Chowdhury, of Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers’ Association and Friends of the Earth Bangladesh, said: “Without money and means of implementation, the places worst hit by climate change are left with only empty pockets and empty promises. We need billions of dollars, we’ve been given peanuts, and even more debt to boot.” Bangladesh is one of the countries most vulnerable to extreme weather and slow-onset impacts such as sea level rise.
The GST is the first assessment on the collective progress made on achieving the legally binding targets set out in the 2015 Paris accords, and crucially will also set the ambition for climate action going forward. The failure to connect GST targets and ambitions to funding means developing countries will need to begin working on their forthcoming national climate action plans for mitigation and adaptation without clear commitments on finance and implementation from developed countries.
“Developed countries basically got everything they wanted without giving up much,” said Meena Raman, a climate policy expert with Third World Network in Malaysia. “There is no equity here.”
The GST also kicks the door wide open for expensive, niche and largely ineffective abatement technologies such as carbon capture and storage, blue hydrogen, carbon markets and geoengineering with negligible safeguards, and which will probably lead to further land grabs, water scarcity and deadly pollution for mostly Indigenous and other communities of colour.
The Association of Small Island States, which includes some of the most climate-vulnerable places on the planet, said the GST contained a “litany of loopholes”.
Hindou Ibrahim, a Chad delegate, said: “They did not listen to what people are saying … [the GST] includes clear permission to companies to build infrastructures and extract minerals to carry out the just transition. Who is going to benefit from that? We cannot just give permission to companies, without including the language of safeguard and respect for the land and the people living around the resources.”
The GST also appears to give gas a lifeline, as it “recognises that transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security” – which will surely delight the US and Russia, among other countries with massive reserves and expansion plans.
Tom Goldtooth, the director of the Indigenous Environmental Network and a Cop veteran, said: “We watched first-hand as the fossil fuel polluters and wealthy governments manipulated developing countries to undermine real action on climate change … [while] our strong messages of fossil fuel phase-out fell on deaf ears and instead more false solutions will accelerate climate change and deforestation … The UN climate change conference has failed humanity and Mother Earth.”
The GST dominated Cop28, but other crucial issues on the table included the global goal on adaptation (GGA), a collective commitment to drive political action and finance for adaptation on the same scale as mitigation, which has been blocked and delayed by developed countries for eight years. The African group had repeatedly said that progress on adaptation was a “life or death” issue for the continent, but they were left disappointed after a fortnight of tense negotiations.
“The text is very weak. Despite the many inputs and submissions we made, our views have not been integrated … and it’s been left open-ended,” said Kulthoum Omari, the African group’s GGA negotiator. “The language on means of implementation is still very weak and does not take into account the obligations under the Paris agreement.”
Cop deals are made by consensus – every nation has to agree before the gavel goes down. So why did the African nations, small island states and other countries who have signalled their discontent with the final outcome concede? According to Raman, a veteran Cop observer, it is hard for poor developing countries to push back and stand their ground when developed countries will not budge and threaten to walk away.
“In the end, the consensus is driven by the most powerful,” she said.
***
https://earth.org/did-cop28-succeed-or-fail/
Climate Change Future Policy & Economics
Did COP28 Succeed or Fail?
CRISIS - Atmospheric CO2 Levels CRISIS - Viability of Life on Earth by Martina Igini Global Commons Middle East Dec 14th 202314 mins
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Wednesday officially marked the end of the year’s most important climate summit, the 28th UN Conference of the Parties. Hosted by a petrostate, led by an oil chief, and attended by an unprecedented number of fossil fuel lobbyists, COP28 was among the most controversial in history. After more than two weeks of intense negotiations, countries finally agreed on an unprecedented deal that touches on topics including climate finance, adaptation, food security, gender, and, most importantly, calls for the first time for a “transition” away from fossil fuels. But there’s much more to it. To answer the question of whether COP28 was successful or not, we must look at the bigger picture.
—
What Was Achieved at COP28?
- Global Stocktake
As set out in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, COP28 marked a historic milestone by conducting the first Global Stocktake (GST), a comprehensive assessment that evaluates the progress made by nations towards their climate goals. The GST, viewed as the key output of COP28, encompasses all aspects that were subject to negotiation and can now serve as a foundation for countries to enhance their climate action plans, which are due by 2025.
Acknowledging the scientific evidence indicating the need for a 43% reduction in global greenhouse gas (GHG emissions by 2030 compared to 2019 levels to limit global warming to 1.5C, the stocktake highlights that Parties are currently falling short of their goals outlined in the 2015 Paris Accord and urges them to take concerted action on a global scale to triple renewable energy capacity and double energy efficiency improvements by 2030.
Governments are failing usThey do not plan for the long term
THE MOVEMENT FIGHTS FOR CHANGE!
In terms of much needed action on global warming adaptation, the final COP28 deal requires countries to deliver a national adaptation plan by 2030 — 51 countries have already done so. As for the Adaptation Fund, a few developed countries have pledged a total of 160 million, half of what is needed to move forward on the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA). The Fund was established in 2001 “to finance concrete adaptation projects and programmes in developing country Parties to the Kyoto Protocol that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.” Contributions to the Fund announced in Dubai by some European countries, including the UK, Italy, and France, are notably low.
" src="cid:part3.F6aUEooL.rETdp2KA@mail.ngo.za" alt="GGA; global adaptation goal demonstration at cop28. Photo: UNclimatechange/Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/unfccc/53392309211/in/photostream/" width="467.5" border="0" class="Apple-web-attachment" style="opacity: 1;">COP28 civil society demanding a Global Goal on Adaptation. Photo: UNclimatechange/Flickr.
You might also like: A Comprehensive Guide to COP28 and the Global Stocktake
- Fossil Fuels
The latest Global Carbon Budget Report, launched on Day 6, suggests that global fossil carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions this year are set to hit a record high of 36.8 billion tonnes, an increase of 1.1% relative to 2022 levels and 1.4% above pre-pandemic levels. Paired with emissions deriving from land-use change – such as deforestation – global CO2 emissions will likely reach 40.9 billion tonnes.
Against this backdrop, several new pledges and alliances on fossil fuels dominated the first week of the summit.
Nine new countries — including the US, COP’s host UAE, Czech Republic, Kosovo, Cyprus, Norway, the Dominican Republic and Iceland — joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance, a large group of nations, sub-national governments, businesses, and organisations pledging to phase out “unabated” coal power first founded at the Glasgow COP26 two years ago.
Colombia made waves by becoming the first Latin American country as well as the largest fossil fuel producer to endorse the Fossil Fuel non-Proliferation Treaty, a bloc of pioneer nations seeking a negotiation mandate for a fossil fuel phaseout. The push for a Treaty is spearheaded by a bloc of 10 nation-states from Latin America, the Pacific, the Caribbean, and South East Asia. The global network behind the proposal is now formed by 2,200 civil society organisations, over 3,000+ scientists and academics and Nobel laureates, and the World Health Organisation (WHO). 100 cities including Los Angeles, Kolkata, Lima, Vancouver, London, and Warsaw, more than 600 Parliamentarians across the world and a growing number of businesses have also joined the calls.
🚨 BREAKING NEWS FROM #COP28! 🚨 #Colombia just became the tenth country to join the call for a #FossilFuelTreaty! 🇨🇴
“I have no doubt which position to take: between fossil capital and life, we choose the side of life.” 🔥 – @petrogustavo https://t.co/FHvP8tecYA🧵 pic.twitter.com/g5Q4d5N2ic
— Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative (@fossiltreaty) December 2, 2023
Methane
Methane, a greenhouse gas 84 times more potent in trapping the heat than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a two-decade period that also possesses a global warming potential 25 times more than that of CO2, drives roughly 30% of the global warming, making action to cut emissions imperative, according to a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report released last week.
At COP28, some countries have come forward and explicitly announced new measures to tackle methane pollution. The US, for example, announced new rules to slash planet-warming methane emissions from oil and gas by nearly 80%. The biggest pledge came from 50 oil and gas companies – including giants ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, and Adnoc, ConocoPhillips, and BP – which signed up to the Oil and Gas Decarbonisation Charter sponsored by the COP28 presidency. By doing so, they agreed to stem releases of methane to near zero by 2030 and stop routine flaring of natural gas. While the targets are not legally binding, signatories – which together account for about one-third of global oil and gas production – have to submit a plan to meet them by 2025.
The World Bank also announced a multi-donor trust fund that will mobilise an initial US$250 million to help developing nations cut CO2 and methane emissions generated by the oil and gas industry. The initiative secured US$25 million each from six major oil companies, including BP, Eni, Shell, and TotalEnergies. Some countries also pledged money to the Fund, including the UAE ($100 million), the US ($2 million), Germany ($1.5 million), and Norway ($1 million). Remarkably, big players Chevron and Exxon Mobil opted out.
The Bank also said it intends to launch at least 15 country-led programs in the next 18 months with the aim to slash up to 10 million tons of methane.
For reactions to the COP28 final deal, check out this article: COP28 Deal Makes Unprecedented Call to ‘Transition Away’ From Fossil Fuels
- Loss and Damage
On the opening day of COP28, delegates from nearly 200 countries approved a framework for the Loss and Damage Fund instituted at COP27 to help developing countries deal with the harm stoked by global warming. The framework, brought forward last month by the 24-member Transitional Committee (TC), a board tasked with the operationalisation of the fund, contains recommendations on how the fund would operate, including who would get the money, and who would pay.
The final text invites “financial contributions with developed country parties continuing to take this lead to provide financial resources for commencing the operationalisation of the Fund.” It also assures the World Bank as the fund’s host on a four-year interim basis – despite the US pushing to make this permanent. Developing nations initially expressed opposition to the idea of the Bank hosting the Fund due to their lack of confidence in the institution’s significant shift towards promoting climate action.
In Dubai, pledges for the fund exceeded US$700 million, including $300-400 million from the European Union (EU) collectively, $100 from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), $50 million from the UK, $17.5 million from the US, and $10 million from Japan.
Nevertheless, critics pointed out that contributions to the Fund represent less than 0.2% of the economic and non-economic losses developing countries face every year from global warming, adding pressure to developed nations to enhance their contributions and provide additional pledges in line with their historical responsibility for loss and damage.
On Tuesday, the UN published new side documents on climate finance, announcing the launch of the Santiago Network for Loss and Damage in 2024, which will be jointly hosted by two UN bodies and will work to “streamline the pathways through which climate-affected nations and regions are able to access technical assistance to prevent losses and damages, and to rectify them when they do occur.”
You might also like: Explainer: What Is ‘Loss and Damage’ Compensation?
- Climate Finance
Rich nations are facing immense pressure to restore trust with developing countries due to their failure to meet the $100 billion per year target on time. Indeed, on “long-term finance”, the final agreement “notes with deep regret” that the $100 billion target – agreed upon in 2011 at COP15 – was not met in 2021, and it “looks forward to further info” on delivery in 2022. Last month, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said that preliminary data indicate that the goal “looks likely to have already been met as of 2022.”
Moreover, recent data shows that rich nations are also not on track to double adaptation finance from 2019 levels by 2025.
Regarding nature, the recent UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) State of Finance for Nature Report suggests that finance flows to activities directly harming nature were more than 30 times larger than the total investments in nature-based solutions last year, which totalled around US$200 billion. According to the UN agency, investments in harmful activities from both public and private sectors each year amount to nearly $7 trillion – roughly 7% of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Countries, especially wealthy ones, are under immense pressure to pledge money to tackle the climate crisis and social injustices that arise from it. Here is a list of the main climate finance announcements at COP28:
- US Vice President Kamala Harris said that the Biden-Harris Administration will pledge an additional $3 billion in funding to the UN Green Climate Fund created in 2010 to support climate action in developing countries. The announcement came on top of $9.3 billion in new commitments already announced by the UK, France, Germany, Japan and other nations.
- The UAE will put $30 billion into a profit-seeking climate finance fund called Alterra, which “plans to buy shares in green companies and to make money when their share prices rise and they pay dividends. According to the COP28 presidency, over $83 billion have been mobilised for the fund.
- The World’s largest multilateral development banks and other international financial institutions signed a Joint Declaration and launched a global “task force” to address high debt burdens, climate change, and biodiversity loss. Led by Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and United States International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), the Taskforce is set to meet for the first time in January 2024.
- Several financial commitments to the health sector were also announced as part of the COP28 UAE Climate and Health Declaration, which commits to putting health at the center of climate action and accelerate the development of climate-resilient, sustainable and equitable health systems. Contributions announced at COP28 in the past two weeks include a $300 million commitment by the Global Fund to prepare health systems, $100 million by the Rockefeller Foundation to scale up climate and health solutions, and an announcement by the UK Government of up to £54 million ($68 million). According to Humans Rights Watch, the declaration fails to address fossil fuels as the main source of GHG emissions driving climate change and air pollution.
- Social enterprise One Acre Fund in partnership International Finance Corporation, U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and the African Risk Capacity launched the ‘One Acre Fund Re’, a reinsurance fund that will provide a critical financial safety net for one million smallholder farmers in 2024 in the face of devastating impacts on crop yields. Natural disasters have caused about $3.8tn worth of lost crops and livestock production over the past three decades globally, yet only 3% of African farmers have insurance coverage.
#COP28 delivered some serious strides forward.
Tripling renewables and doubling energy efficiency.
Operationalizing the loss and damage fund.
A framework for the Global Goal on Adaptation.
The crucial years ahead must keep ramping up ambition and climate action. pic.twitter.com/DSC1lGKoMn
— Simon Stiell (@simonstiell) December 13, 2023
- Agriculture and Food Security
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) launched a Global Roadmap to 1.5C, the first of its kind for food systems. It sets out targets and timelines for ten areas where immediate action is required, including livestock, soil and water, and food loss and waste.
152 countries – which together represent 5.7 billion people and 75% of all emissions from global food production and consumption – also signed the Emirates Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action, the result of a year of negotiations between the COP28 Presidency and farmer groups and civil society organisations from Africa. It commits governments to formally include food and agriculture in national climate plans – an unprecedented pledge. By signing it, countries pledge to work to reduce GHG emissions from processes related to producing and consuming for the first time and to scale up funding.
The Declaration has garnered widespread approval. “It’s great to finally have food on the COP menu,” said Clement Metivier, a climate and biodiversity policy expert at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) for Nature in the UK. “There is really a growing momentum around food systems transformation to tackle both the biodiversity and climate crisis.” At the same time, it has faced scrutiny from food experts, including the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, due to the lack of specific targets or explicit measures to tackle sustainable diets. “It’s at least a commitment at the highest level, but there’s still not much specificity in terms of what actually needs to be done,” said biodiversity and agriculture researcher Lim Li Ching at the Third World Network, a non-governmental organisation based in Malaysia. “We need an inclusion of food systems and phasing out of fossil fuels to be built into the revision of national climate commitments.”
Finally, Brazil, Cambodia, Norway, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda stepped forward as founding co-chairs and members of the Alliance of Champions for Food Systems Transformation (ACF), a coalition aiming to transform national food systems to deliver universal access to affordable, nutritious and sustainable diets. The five countries are pledging to update their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and other action plans in line with updated National Food System Transformation Pathways and/or Implementation Plans by 2025 at the latest as well as to report annually on targets and priority intervention areas.
You might also like: Sustainable Diets: Will the First Global Declaration on Food-Related Emissions Work?
Controversies at COP28
While past COP meetings have had their fair share of controversies, COP28 might go down in history as the most controversial UN climate summit, with some climate activists calling it a “farce” due to the presence of thousands of fossil fuel representatives.
The fossil fuel-loaded summit, which this year has an unprecedented presence of oil and gas lobbyists – at least 2,456 according to a recent analysis – was hosted by one of the world’s richest petrostates in the world – the UAE. The Middle Eastern country is among the world’s ten largest oil producers, with an average of 3.2 million barrels of petroleum and liquids produced every day.
Tasked with selecting a president to oversee the climate negotiations, the UAE nominated a highly controversial figure: Sultan Al Jaber. Al Jaber is the head of state oil giant Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) – a state-owned company that pumps almost all the crude oil in the UAE and produces about 3.2 million barrels a day. He is also the UAE’s special envoy on climate change and minister of industry and technology.
In the runup to the summit, Al Jaber repeatedly emphasised the need to phase out fossil fuel emissions, rather than production, by focussing on the development of new emission reduction technologies. ”In a pragmatic, just and well-managed energy transition, we must be laser-focused on phasing out fossil fuel emissions, while phasing up viable, affordable zero-carbon alternatives,” he said at a climate conference earlier this year.
A similar opinion was voiced by the head of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Haitham Al Ghais last week. In a letter to 13 OPEC members written in response to the second draft of the COP28 final agreement – which hinted a call to phase-out fossil fuels – Al Ghais urged members to “proactively reject any text or formula that targets energy i.e. fossil fuels rather than emissions,” saying that the text put “undue and disproportionate pressure” on the fossil fuel industry.
He faced huge backlash for comments he had made during an exchange with former Irish president Mary Robinson at a live online event on November 21, where he denied climate science. There is “no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C,” he said.
What’s more, an investigation by the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR) and the BBC revealed last week that the COP28 presidency was planning to use meetings with foreign countries to push for oil and gas deals. Despite Al Jaber repeatedly denying his involvement, leaked documents show that fossil fuels were among the talking points in meetings between UAE energy companies and 15 nations ahead of the summit. This is further reinforced by the fact that the UAE granted access to at least 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists, nearly four times as many as last year and a number higher than all but one of the national delegations present in Dubai. Meat and livestock lobbyists and representatives from other planet-trashing industries have also left a mark on this year’s summit.
“To share seats with the Big Polluters in climate change conversations is to dine with the devil,” said Ogunlade Olamide Martins, Program Manager at the Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA). “This unholy matrimony will only endorse “conflict of interest” and further facilitate the silence of honest agitation. COP’s conclusions must be independent of industries’ parasitic influences and must only address the concerns of the vulnerable masses.”
COP28 sponsors were also under the radar. According to an analysis carried out by Spendwell, out of 24 companies sponsoring the talks, only one has committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions in line with net-zero targets – so-called Science Based Targets – set by the UN. Last year, an investigation into COP27 sponsor Coca-Cola unveiled that the company had dramatically increased the use of plastic ahead of the summit.
Also worth mentioning is the trip of Russian President Vladimir Putin to the country, which, coincidentally or not, coincided with COP. While steering clear of the summit, his presence in the country to discuss energy – the first trip to the Middle East since Russia invaded Ukraine – cast a long shadow.
For a detailed analysis of the key announcements of the past two weeks, check outEarth.Org’s Week 1 and Week 2 recaps.
COP29: An Outlook
Following days of delicate negotiations, delegates last week selected the city of Baka, Azerbaijan’s capital, to be the host of next year’s climate talks.
Under UN rules, it was eastern Europe’s turn to take over the COP presidency, though an unanimous vote was required. Russia’s veto on all EU countries, delegates were left with just a few options, though not all cities on the list had the money and infrastructure needed to host a conference that every year sees tens of thousands of participants. While Azerbaijan and Armenia were initially vetoing each other, the latter eventually retracted its bid and backed Azerbaijan.
#COP29: Host must be in eastern Europe. Russia is vetoing EU countries. Armenia & Azerbaijan are vetoing each other. Russia, Ukraine, Belarus are unlikely to fly, for obvious reasons.
List is pretty threadbare, esp when you consider host needs to have intl conference facilities https://t.co/SC4CDZ6foB pic.twitter.com/JkAMbE3tYS
— Simon Evans (@DrSimEvans) December 4, 2023
Given this year’s controversies, the adverse reaction of activists and some countries to this decision did not come as a surprise. Having Azerbaijan – a highly fossil fuel-dependent state and the oldest oil-producing region in the world – host COP29, means effectively allowing Big Oil on the climate table, again.
Did COP28 Succeed or Fail?
Determining whether COP28 was a success or failure is a complex matter, and it would be oversimplifying to categorize it as either one. Certainly, the final deal went down in history as one of the boldest for containing relatively strong wording on fossil fuels for the first time in decades. One thing is sure: the outcomes of the Dubai summit have a profound impact on how the world moves forward in terms of climate action.
Undoubtedly, countries could have taken bolder actions – particularly in term of climate finance – and it is undeniable that responsibility lies with powerful actors, petro-state governments, and the fossil fuel industry for the insufficient progress and the notoriously absence of a call to phase out planet warming oil, gas, and coal.
However, it is also true that without UN climate conferences, making global strides would be incredibly challenging. COPs provide a platform for countries to engage in discussions and collaborate in managing the climate crisis. The progress made in addressing climate change since the historic adoption of the 1.5C goal in 2015 Paris Agreement has surpassed the achievements of the previous 25 years.
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Phase Down, Not Phase Out: COP28 Deal on Fossil Fuels Disappoints Activists & Vulnerable States
By Asad Rehman, Amy Goodman , Juan Gonzalez December 13, 2023Z VideoNo Comments14 Mins Read
Source: Democracy Now!
As the United Nations climate summit ends with nations pledging to transition away from fossil fuels instead of explicitly calling for a fossil fuel phaseout, we go to the COP28 site in Dubai for a debrief with Asad Rehman, spokesperson for the Climate Justice Coalition. He says the deal overseen by COP28 president and head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company Sultan Al Jaber is a “very weak text” with “lots of loopholes” that allows rich countries to avoid responsibility. “If you’re an oil and gas baron and CEO, you must be rubbing your hands with glee,” says Rehman. “This requires everybody to take action, but developing countries can only act if they’re given the support.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: The U.N. climate summit in Dubai has ended with nations pledging to transition away from fossil fuels, but critics say the deal is filled with loopholes that will undermine efforts to combat the climate crisis. The final text fails to explicitly call for a phaseout of fossil fuels, language sought by over 100 countries. Instead, one key passage of the deal reads, quote, “Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science,” unquote.
The COP28 president, Sultan Al Jaber, who is the head of ADNOC — that’s the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company — described the deal as “historic.”
SULTAN AHMED AL JABER: We have confronted realities, and we have set the world in the right direction. We have given it a robust action plan to keep 1.5 within reach. It is a plan that is led by the science. It is a balanced plan that tackles emissions, bridges the gap on adaptation, reimagines global finance and delivers on loss and damage.
AMY GOODMAN: COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber declared consensus on the final document early today, even though a grouping of 39 island nations known as AOSIS — that’s the Alliance of Small Island States — was not even in the room. The Samoan negotiator, Anne Rasmussen, who is the chair of AOSIS, criticized the final text.
ANNE RASMUSSEN: It seems that you just gaveled the decisions, and the small island developing states were not in the room. We were working hard to coordinate the 39 small island states, developing states, that are disproportionately affected by climate change, and so we were delayed in arriving here. … The questions we have considered as the Alliance of Small Island States is whether they are enough. Zoning in on paragraph 26 and 29 of this decision, we have come to the conclusion that the course correction that is needed has not been secured. We have made an incremental advancement over business as usual, when what we really needed is an exponential step change in our actions and support.
AMY GOODMAN: Critics have called out the allowance of ill-defined transitional fuels as a major loophole of the deal, which also opens the door to false technological solutions, they say, to combat the climate crisis. African activists said the deal does not provide sufficient mechanisms or funding from wealthy, high-polluting countries like the U.S. and European nations for poorer nations to shift away from fossil fuels.
Joining us now from Dubai, where we just came from, at the site of the COP28 is Asad Rehman, the executive director of War on Want, lead spokesperson for the Climate Justice Coalition.
Asad, welcome back to Democracy Now! As we see you now as the final document has been accepted, can you respond to, overall, what’s said, and explicitly your concerns?
ASAD REHMAN: Welcome, first of all. Thank you, Amy.
You’re right: The document has been accepted. And there has been a lot of attention on the words around fossil fuel and whether this would signal the end of the era of deadly fossil fuels. And unfortunately, whilst the word is there, the signal is clearly not.
What we’ve seen is a lot of very weak text there, lots of loopholes. You mentioned the transition fuels. I mean, quite incredibly, they include one of the most polluting fossil fuels, gas, as a transition fuel. None of the transition is funded, so the scale of the transition, particularly for developing countries, will be unable to be met. And there are loopholes in terms of so much in risky technologies, dangerous and unproven technologies, to suck carbon out of the atmosphere.
I mean, if you’re an oil and gas baron and CEO, you must be rubbing your hands with glee. This is continuing to be a license to pollute. And whilst the words on the text might be applauded, the reality is you can’t fool science, and you can’t fool the reality that we actually need to transition fairly and equitably and speedily away from fossil fuels, but also addressing the real challenges many developing countries have with poverty, and particularly with energy poverty, as well.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Asad, I’m wondering if you could comment on the presence and influence of industry trade groups, think tanks and public relations agencies with a track record of climate denialism participating in this summit.
ASAD REHMAN: So, often anybody who comes to these climate negotiations would be surprised at probably how big a trade fair sits alongside the actual negotiators, where companies and CEOs and lobbyists peddle their influence both on governments and negotiators, but also striking deals with each other. But the reality is, of course, it’s not just here in Dubai that those lobbyists are at work. They’re also at work in the capitals in Washington and London and Brussels.
And that’s why many negotiators, particularly from developing countries, and climate justice groups looked aghast at the fact that the European Union, the United States and the United Kingdom were all making speeches saying the 1.5 degrees is the North Star, their commitment to tackle fossil fuels, whilst, of course, being responsible for half — over half of all new fossil fuel expansion all around the world. People know the reality, that what’s being said here is empty words, and reality on the back — back home is that an expansion of those fossil fuels. So there’s a lack of trust that exists here. People have realized that over decades there’s been plenty of broken promises, whether it’s on finance, whether it’s on the United States saying, “We don’t want to even discuss the fact that we have not met our previous pledge to cut our emissions.”
What’s happening here in these negotiations is really a ripping out and gutting out of the responsibility of rich countries, who caused most of this problem, and shifting the responsibility to developing countries. And that’s both in the interests of these big private companies, because the few mentions that there are about climate finance are all around private capital, and private capital is about making profit. And what they’re proposing is that governments who are deeply in debt, who have got small public fiscal space, commit their money, public money, to basically underwrite private corporations’ ability to be able to make profit. And where they want to make profit, of course, is not in actually helping poorer people be able to adapt to the realities of climate violence or adapt to the fact that we’re facing huge economic, social and cultural losses from killer floods, fires and famines. What they want to do is take control of what little remains of these countries’ energy systems and other public systems.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what about this whole issue of the most polluting nations assisting the developing world and the Global South in dealing with the climate catastrophe?
ASAD REHMAN: Well, that’s been, I suppose, the big fissure that’s been running through all of these climate negotiations for the last 28 years. It’s whether rich countries, you know, still overwhelmingly are responsible for the majority of the emissions that are in the atmosphere, and per capita how much each of us emit as citizens, that’s overwhelming still — you know, 11% of the population is in the Global North. They’re overwhelmingly responsible for the majority of emissions in the atmosphere. Would those countries not only cut their own emissions, but provide support in the form of finance and technology?
Now, a promise was made back in 2009 for $100 billion. That hasn’t been met. There’s a big discussion going to have to take place next year whether climate finance is going to be on the base of need, and a recognition that we’re really talking about is not just hundreds of millions, but, of course, billions and up to trillions. And what was really striking at the beginning of these negotiations was that the United States pledged merely a few million into the loss and damage fund, while, of course, it didn’t escape people that it was happy to make requests to Congress for hundreds of billions for bombs and bullets for wars all around the world.
So, there’s a disconnect between the reality of what’s happening on the need, the crisis developing countries face, not just from climate, but from being trapped in unjust debt repayments, from a broken and rigged economic system, from harming — their resources being exploited, but also the reality that, you know, rich countries who have grown wealthiest are simply turning their back. Now, this requires everybody to take action, but developing countries can only act if they’re given the support.
AMY GOODMAN: This is U.S. climate envoy John Kerry speaking earlier today at the closing session of the U.N. climate summit.
JOHN KERRY: The fact is that this document sends very strong messages to the world. First, the document highlights that we have to adhere to keeping 1.5 degrees within reach. That is the North Star. And we, therefore, must do those things necessary to keep the 1.5, everything we can to achieve this goal.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s John Kerry. Asad Rehman, if you can respond? And also, talk about — I think Gore said on the draft final text, this is an agreement by and for petrostates. Next year it’s going to be in Baku, in another petrostate, in Azerbaijan. And yet, can you talk about why this particular U.N. climate summit in the UAE was so important? Some are more important than others.
ASAD REHMAN: Well, the reason why this summit was very, very important was, back when the Paris Agreement was signed by every country in the world, everybody recognized that the promises that were being made, particularly by developed countries, were so low that they were not going to keep us below the 1.5 degree, the threshold and the guardrail, which we know, and the climate scientists have told us, we begin to face runaway climate catastrophe. And then, no matter what we do, the impacts get deeper, faster and more violent and affect more people. Now, after five years, we were meant to assess how much progress countries have made. How much have they cut their emissions? How much finance have they provided? How much support have they given to countries to be able to adapt to the fact that climate change is now happening, much faster than we thought, with much more severity than we thought? And that conversation is the global stocktake.
And what we’ve seen here actually is a document with the fingerprints of the United States, the U.K. and the European Union, because what it talks about is only about cutting emissions, but not about responsibility. So the idea of fairness is going. The idea of providing climate finance, public climate finance, that is really desperately needed, is being frittered away. Instead, the only mentions of finance are about private capital and a push to make developing countries have what they call an enabling environment. Now, we have seen in real life what that enabling environment looks like. We’ve seen it in Sri Lanka. We’ve seen it in Pakistan, other countries, which have faced these crises of both debt and climate. And what it means is you’re lowering your environmental standards. You’re lowering your workers’ rights standards. You make your economy much more attractive to private capital. That private capital needs to make profit. And what private capital wants is guarantees that it will make that profit. And so now the responsibility has fallen on developing countries to guarantee that profit. It’s utter madness. And so, this is just one part of actually what was being negotiated here.
We were meant to also negotiate a goal on adaptation. Again, how will countries, particularly in the Global South, who are on the forefront of climate impacts — how will they be able to adapt? Will they be provided with technology and support? Now, particularly the group of African countries, which have been severely impacted, wanted real concrete goals. They wanted a goal on finance, a goal on technology. How could they begin to plan? And developed countries have all said, “We don’t want any of that discussion. There will be no discussion about actual concrete action.”
And incredibly, the one window of hope that there is is, of course, that we know that if we are able to transition away from fossil fuels, if we are able to transition from our broken food system and from this unequal economic system, we actually will make people’s lives better, fairer, more just, not just in the Global South, but also in the Global North, where many, many people are struggling to make ends meet, where they can’t feed their families or heat their homes. And that is called the just transition pathway. But again there, the United States doesn’t want any concrete conversation, just wants talk shops.
AMY GOODMAN: Asad Rehman, we just have a minute, and I wanted to end by asking you about what you’re wearing. You’ve got a lanyard on that’s the colors of the Palestinian flag, and you’ve got a pin that is a pin of a watermelon, the colors of the Palestinian flag. We last saw you on Friday, when you were holding a news conference saying you are not allowed to protest about Gaza or say, issue — have signs that said “ceasefire now.” Yet on Saturday there was major demonstrations there that you were a part of. Explain the issue that you tried to raise, the historic nature of what you did during this U.N. climate summit, from Israel’s bombardment of Gaza to the mentioning of prisoners, political prisoners, in the UAE itself.
ASAD REHMAN: Well, the climate justice movements have always recognized that climate — the climate struggle is not about simply about carbon. It is about these interwoven issues of justice. And we are fundamentally a justice movement. And what binds this movement together is the idea of solidarity for those on the frontlines of crisis, whether they’re Indigenous movements, whether it’s antiracists in the Black community in the United States fighting around for Black Lives Matter, to the Palestinian people in its — we’re in a region where a few hundred miles away, you know, a people are facing ethnic cleansing, indiscriminate bombing, and, of course, many of our colleagues and partners are there.
In this place, huge restrictions were put on us about whether we could even make the call about ceasefire now, whether we could raise the question of Palestine. But I have to say, the power of our movements organizing here said, “We refuse. We absolutely will stand up on Palestine. We will make that call for ceasefire now. We are going to say with a very, very strong voice that there is no climate justice without human rights.” And just as we did in Egypt when we raised the issue of political prisoners there, we raised the issue of political prisoners here in the UAE, as well.
Ultimately, this is a struggle about justice and about an unequal and an unjust world, where the powerful can do what they want against the powerless. And what is shocking was yesterday John Kerry said — in trying to push through this text, he said, “We have never been in a position where the decisions we make will have life-or-death impact.” All of us gasped, since the United States last week vetoed a resolution that would have stopped the killing in Gaza. This is where politicians and our governments are so disconnected from the demands and realities of ordinary people.
AMY GOODMAN: Asad Rehman, we want to thank you for being with us, executive director of War on Want, lead spokesperson for the Climate Justice Coalition, speaking to us from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.
***
https://mg.co.za/editorial/2023-12-14-editorial-cop28-a-compromise-well-pay-for/
14 DECEMBER 2023
Editorial: COP28 a compromise we’ll pay for
By Editorial
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The president of COP28, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, is also the chief executive of the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Photo: Beata Zawrzel/Getty Images
Every year the United Nations hosts a climate summit known as the Conference of Parties (COP). The aim of it is to find solutions for the climate crisis the world is in.
The major cause of climate change is fossil fuels — coal, oil and gas. These cause about 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions, which blanket the Earth and trap the sun’s heat causing global warming and climate change.
The solution seems simple: get rid of fossil fuels, which will result in far fewer emissions, reducing climate change.
This year the United Arab Emirates — a major fossil fuel-based nation — hosted the Conference of the Parties.
The president of COP28, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, is also the chief executive of the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
During the conference he declared “no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5°C”.
It gets worse. The Guardian reported that this year a record number of fossil fuel lobbyists attended COP28. That number reached 2 456 people. To put it into context, more people from the fossil fuel industry had passes to the summit than delegates from nations particularly vulnerable to climate change.
If the fossil fuel industry is a key contributor to this problem the world faces, why do they have a voice and a seat at a summit where the removal of fossil fuels is crucial?
The credibility of this event must be called into question.
There was drama on the penultimate day of the summit.
As discussions were taking place on the final text, threats to withdraw from the summit reverberated through the media. Why? Because the phasing out of fossil fuels was absent from the final text of the first draft.
Seemingly the push by countries such as major oil producer Saudi Arabia to not have the phasing out of fossil fuels in this text was working.
But the fact that early versions of the final text was devoid of language saying fossil fuels must be phased out reeks of capture.
Al Jaber had his work cut out for him; he needed to herd the cats and ensure a resolution and compromise was reached before COP28 was declared an abject failure.
In the end, fossil fuels did feature in the final text, something that has never happened before — but the agreement was for “a transition” away from fossil fuels. Al Jaber avoided upsetting the oil bloc by not reaching an agreement on a phase-out of fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, our planet and its people will continue to suffer from climate change.
***
https://www.commondreams.org/news/u-s-cop28-hypocrisy-fossil-fuels
US Hypocrisy at COP28 Seems Designed ‘To Drive People Insane’
One critic noted that the United States is “insisting that a fossil fuel phaseout is the moral litmus test for climate leadership at COP28 while reaching record levels crude oil production—with no plans to stop!”
Dec 12, 2023
13
As the current United Nations Climate Change Conference draws to a close, campaigners and journalists say U.S. hypocrisy is making it harder to negotiate a just and equitable phaseout of fossil fuels.
U.S. Special Envoy for Climate John Kerry said at the talks that he supported a phaseout, as The New York Times reported, and the U.S. State Department said Monday that a draft that excluded it “needs to be substantially strengthened,” according to the Financial Times. Yet U.S. projects make up more than a third of all new oil and gas extraction planned worldwide through 2050, prompting Oil Change International to dub it the “planet-wrecker-in-chief.”
“The U.S. insisting that a fossil fuel phaseout is the moral litmus test for climate leadership at COP28 while reaching record levels crude oil production—with no plans to stop!—feels like a strategy designed in a lab to drive people insane,” journalist Kate Aronoff tweeted Monday.
“It’s easy to point the finger at some of the Gulf states here, but we should not ignore the fact that the United States has the single largest oil and gas expansion plans of any country in the world by far.”
When a draft text of the Global Stocktake was published Monday with no mention of the fossil fuel phaseout called for by civil society and many climate vulnerable nations, much of the outrage focused on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), including COP28 host country the United Arab Emirates. The conference already faced scrutiny because its president, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, is also the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), and a whistleblower account ahead of the conference revealed he had been using COP28 negotiations to push oil and gas deals.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, for example, said the draft text read “as if OPEC dictated it word for word,” adding it was “‘of the Petrostates, by the Petrostates, and for the Petrostates.’”
Yet even before the draft, climate advocates had pointed out that the so-called petrostates weren’t the only ones obstructing progress: While not a member of OPEC, the U.S. has been the leading producer of oil and gas for the last five years, overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia by 44%, according to Inside Climate News.
“It’s easy to point the finger at some of the Gulf states here, but we should not ignore the fact that the United States has the single largest oil and gas expansion plans of any country in the world by far,” Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns with ActionAid USA, told Inside Climate News.
At the same time, the U.S. is pushing untested solutions like carbon capture and storage (CCS) and treating Indigenous, minority, and low-income communities within its own borders as sacrifice zones.
“They want to ship captured carbon from their land to my homelands and sequester it there,” Panganga Pungowiyi, an Indigenous mother from Sivungaq, on Dena ina lands near Anchorage, Alaska, told Inside Climate News. “What we’re observing is the violation of Indigenous people’s rights and the violation of the sacredness of Mother Earth by continued commodification, whether by the extraction of fossil fuels or by the designation of her body and surface as a storage facility for carbon.”
“The U.S., in other words, would like the rest of the world to agree to do something it cannot possibly do itself.”
When it comes to fossil fuel expansion in particular, the U.S. Gulf Coast sits on the frontlines of drilling, petrochemical manufacturing, and the buildout of liquefied natural gas export facilities.
“To us in the Gulf South, what they say is not matched by their actions,” John Beard, founder and executive director of the Port Arthur Community Action Network in Texas, told Inside Climate News of the U.S. government. “They continue to do more of what created the problem by allowing more liquid fossil gas facilities to be sited and by expediting more crude oil exports.”
Overall, President Joe Biden approved more oil and gas drilling permits on public lands in the first two years of his administration than did former President Donald Trump in the first two years of his, despite a campaign promise to end the practice.
What’s true of government plans is also true of U.S.-based fossil fuel companies, Aronoff pointed out for The New Republic: ExxonMobil plans to increase production by 11% next year and even further to 4.2 million barrels of oil a day by 2027 while Chevron said it would increase its spending from $17 billion this year to $18.5-19.5 billion in 2024. Current U.S. law does not limit fossil fuel production; the Inflation Reduction Act only provides carrots for renewable energy, not sticks for oil, gas, and coal. And the makeup of Congress means that Democrats would have a difficult time passing laws to restrict fossil fuels even if they wanted to.
By calling for a fossil fuel phaseout at COP28, Aronoff wrote, “the U.S., in other words, would like the rest of the world to agree to do something it cannot possibly do itself. It is by all accounts planning to speed in the opposite direction, with no plans to place any limits on the companies leading that charge. You’d be forgiven for thinking this situation doesn’t make any sense because it doesn’t.”
Another factor that undermines the U.S. and other wealthy nations during climate negotiations is their lack of commitment to funding the renewable energy transition in developing countries.
“Where is the money? Where’s the money?”
While the U.S. and E.U. call for a phaseout, Sara Shaw of Friends of the Earth International said, “they are seeking to water down the climate finance provisions (one of the elements of the text which is better than expected) so urgently needed to enable the energy transition in the Global South.”
The U.S. has already successfully weakened the framework document for the new Loss and Damage Fund to help developing nations with the inevitable costs of climate change, Wu wrotein Context. Instead of stipulating that developed nations contribute, it now reads, “The fund is able to receive contributions from a wide variety of sources.
Wu added on social media that some developing countries are satisfied with the COP28 stocktake draft text as is because they do not think it would be possible to phase out fossil fuels without funding, and they do not trust wealthy nations to provide it.
“No phaseout/no finance leads to climate chaos. Phaseout/no finance ALSO leads to climate disaster, because a phaseout isn’t possible in the majority world without finance and tech,” Wu tweeted. “We need phaseout WITH finance.”
“Only developed countries have the ability to deliver the missing ingredient to make this whole process work,” Wu continued. “Not only are they not doing it, they’re signaling that they never want to do it, by watering all new text recalling their obligations. It’s never been clearer that providing finance is not only an ethical imperative, it’s also a climate imperative. If we must play a blame game, let’s point the finger at the developed countries that have been consistently failing this imperative.”
Romain Ioualalen, the global policy campaign manager at Oil Change International, added: “Where is the money? Where’s the money? We’ve been hearing from the African group in particular that they’re not opposed to transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy but they’re going to need support.”
“If developed countries had met their financial obligations in this process, and were sending a clear signal that these countries would be financially supported through the transition, maybe the deal would be more secure at this stage,” Ioualalen said.
On 12/12/2023 10:05 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
(Dubai is suffering from "Oil Jabber" cacophony. The current UAE president's 28th Conference of Polluters closing statement will get a new moniker, Oil Jabber, in honour of Sultan Al-Jaber, the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Not only grassroots environmentalists and CJ advocates, but even naysayers from the global policy elite, like Al Gore, condemn it: "This obsequious draft reads as if Opec dictated it word for word." https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/12/12/cop28-bulletin-presidency-draft-text-draws-angry-response
Yet secretly, Western and BRICS+ fossil addicts are celebrating. As just one example, yesterday officials from South Africa and Russia were so confident that the COP28 will sabotage fossil-phaseout language, that they very publicly agreed to rebuild and expand a recently-closed oil refinery in the vicinity of an Indian Ocean methane gas field that TotalEnergies discovered in 2019, notwithstanding sanctions against Moscow-based Gazprom. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2023-12-11-cabinet-signs-off-on-controversial-r3-7bn-gazprombank-deal-to-reboot-mossel-bay-refinery/ and https://www.news24.com/fin24/new-oil-find-could-be-a-game-changer-for-sa-says-ramaphosa-20190207 and https://www.cadtm.org/French-fossil-imperialism-South-African-subimperialism-and-anti-imperial
A core proponent of more oil and gas drilling is SA 'environment minister' Barbara Creecy, whom Al-Jaber put in charge of the Global Stocktake, and whose deputy Richard Sherman is co-chairing the Loss & Damage committee. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2023-11-30-oil-soaked-climate-summit-disaster-looms-thanks-partly-to-elite-south-african-self-interest/andhttps://oceansnotoil.org/2023/04/22/creecys-greasy-oil-gas-sector-plan-for-the-ocean-commons/
That Loss&Damage exercise appears to be a complete failure, as Western/BRICS+ ultra-emitters still refuse polluter-pays responsibilities.
Activists won't take this lying down. Protests occurred on Saturday in 28 locations along the South African coastline: https://oceansnotoil.org/events/ and https://oceansnotoil.org/2023/12/09/cgg-seismic-sucks-activation-day-success/
And here's Ugandan youth leader Vanessa Nakate: “A lot has been said about the text. What I will say is that what is happening here is unacceptable. What is happening is unjust. What is happening is unfair, especially for the communities on the front line. If we do not address the root cause of the climate crisis, everything else is pointless.”)
The Guardian
Campaigners warn historic loss and damage agreement still lacking
Nina Lakhani
Once upon a time, 12 long days ago, we were celebrating the establishment of the loss and damage fund – a historic agreement that has so far generated almost $800m in pledges. But experts warned that the job was far from done, and that key issues needed to be addressed in the global stocktake to facilitate the fund’s future success. Alas, the draft text failed to deliver on a number of fronts, according to loss and damage followers, including:
- Scale: there is no mention of how much money is required to cover the costs of irreversible loss and damage, which already stand at about $400bn a year – developing countries pushed for a floor of $100bn a year but didn’t even get that.
- Siloed: Loss and damage is missing from the preamble, finance, cross-cutting and way forward sections; the specific agenda item is also gone. Instead, loss and damage is relegated to its own silo or section, with no recognition of the links between mitigation, adaptation, finance more broadly and loss and damage.
- Responsibility: Developed countries should be funding loss and damage but the language is wishy-washy and only “urges” them to provide support
- Missing data: A loss and damage gap report is vital so that there is broad and agreed understanding of what funding is required – but that’s been watered down to a synthesis report based on national assessments.
Julie-Anne Richards, of the Loss and Damage Collaboration, said: “The presidency and developed countries clearly think they have ticked the loss and damage box at this Cop … but initial pledges are very, very low compared to need, with no clear way forward. It is vital to ensure that loss and damage is well reflected in the final global stocktake … to provide an assessment of how loss and damage is impacting communities and countries on the frontline, reflect the scale of needs and set a clear expectation that the fund will be capitalised and replenished to meet this need.”
Yamide Dagnet, director of climate justice at Open Society Foundation, said: “Loss and damage should be in the GST preamble, and linked to 1.5C, adaptation, and finance, but this interconnectedness is currently missing. Developing countries pushed for a floor but developed countries didn’t want it, and there is no reference to scale which is worrying. Access for frontline communities and countries is very important and should also be clearer.”
***
Pan African Climate Justice Alliance
PRESS RELEASE
A Failure: COP28 further weakens the Paris Agreement
Dubai, UEA. 11/12/2023
Our worst fears have come to pass.
The Dubai Climate Change Conference ends with a predictably failed crescendo, and once again, the UNFCCC multilateral process has proved a mirage for millions of vulnerable people in Africa and world over, whose aspirations, desires and expectations have been dashed.
COP28 has missed the opportunity to put the world on track to deeply reduce greenhouse gas emissions consistent to the Paris Agreement target of keeping post-industrial revolution global mean temperature rise under 1.5 degrees Celsius at the turn of this century.
As we outlined during our initial and second press Conferences, we welcome establishment of the Loss and Damage Fund despite its “slap-on-the-face, peanut pledges”, but refuse to celebrate it since several issues – notably the extended timeframe to access the money – are yet to be resolved for the Fund to be of optimal use to communities at the frontline of climate change impacts.
Earlier this year, we warned that the outcome we are staring in the next couple of hours was inevitable after the host country, the United Arab Emirates (UEA) appointed an oil Executive, Sultan Al Jaber to preside over the negotiations. In addition to being indifferent, contentious and exhibiting don’t-care attitude which have been captured in the media, Sultan Al Jabar has undeniably become an enabler, and foreseen the participation of the historic number of big polluters, promoters of false climate solutions and anti-climate corporate interests.
We have reason to believe that the Parties have surrendered, and /or ceded the negotiations to climate profiteers, profaners of justice and entertained the influence of ill-intentioned individuals whose vision is to derail and retard the global transition to low-carbon, climate-resilient, inclusive and ecologically-just development pathways. The continuation of this trend will, no doubt, undermine the spirit of the UN Climate Convention, the Paris Agreement and the irreparably damage the imperatives of climate justice, with dire consequences to people, society and economies in Africa, further South and North.
After following the debates and negotiations over the last two weeks, we feel disappointed, unsettled and hopeless. Critical issues relevant to Africa and the collective desire to tackle the climate crisis - especially adaptation, adaptation finance and Global Goal on Adaptation - remain marginal and contentious. Less than 24 hours before the closure of COP28, close to 70% of negotiations items remain open, thus demonstrating lack of commitment and sense of urgency to move the process towards positive outcomes.
We note:
- On the phasing-out of fossil fuels.
Phasing out fossil fuels, the single-most significant action needed to limit the emissions of most greenhouse gases and reversing global warming, looks a muzzled conversation in COP28 despite evidence generated in the Global Stock Take Process. Business interests side-stepped the imperative of keeping the mean global temperatures rise below 1.5 degrees Celius and creating a resilient globe, especially for communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Beyond exploring further commercial interests through scaling renewables, which we obviously support, and paving the way of land and forest grabbing through bilateral deals ostensibly pursuant to carbon trading, Dubai will go into the annals of history as the COP which was equivocal in undermining rapid phaseout of fossil fuels – of course aided by the oil-addicted President.
- Securing Adaptation Agenda
We lament the lack of a tangible outcome on the Global Goal on Adaptation and any strong commitments to “more than double” adaptation finance flows to Africa. COP28 generated a paltry $156 million in pledges for adaptation finance, compared to Billions of Dollars pledged for mitigation-centric initiatives. But this falls short of the pledges made in Glasgow to double adaptation finance to $40 billion annually.
Adaptation remains the single-most important priority for Africa because of the disproportionate levels of vulnerabilities and adverse impacts on its populations and economies. The push for an aspirational Global Goal on Adaptation cannot be rationalized with a push for voluntary implementation of this goal, particularly with national-level leadership and without a strong commitment to global climate finance.
Furthermore, the decision to run a two-year program on the GGA, with yet another round of wasteful workshops, reveals a concerning lack of urgency in responding to communities that are in dire need of faster adaptation and resilience-building, local actions. It has become evident that developed countries are using delaying tactics to avoid fulfilling their commitment to provide the necessary climate funds for effective adaptation action.
- Climate Finance
We have repeatedly emphasized the importance of developed countries fulfilling their climate finance commitments. It should be noted that the current demands for climate finance are in billions of dollars annually, not just the previously pledged USD 100 billion, which OECD just indicated they have already delivered – there is a difference between the money in Paper and what is tangibly felt and seen on the ground. Unfortunately, COP28 has not yet taken any significant action towards the Finance goal.
- Loss and Damage
We call for the application of the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities to include securing sustainable replenishment for the Fund and responsive access mechanisms for communities at the frontline of the crisis.
We urge developed countries to be transparent and accountable in demonstrating their contributions to the loss and damage kitty, instead of simply repackaging existing climate financing and/or ODA in their climate pledges. We believe that the Loss and Damage Fund, important as it is, should not be used as a distraction from critical issues of negotiations. Rather, it should be utilized to stimulate developed Nations’ to take action in reducing emissions and increasing climate finance for adaptation.
- On Global Stock Take:
We were very clear in our call for action based on the evidence presented by the GST, which shows that global temperatures are reaching alarming levels and the gap in adaptation measures is widening. However, COP28 failed to use the scientific evidence generated by the UNFCCC to make progressive decisions.
We welcome the Just Transition Work Programme on just transition pathway that paves way for the design of a comprehensive programme. However, we insist on a transition that is sector-wide, graceful, fair, gender responsive and equitable and that takes into account social-economic and political realities of different regions, nations, as well as the imperatives of climate justice. Just transition cannot be a super-highway for developed countries to unreasonably perpetuate and entrench their unfair economic and investments interests that have resulted into poverty, unemployment, mineral/resource-conflicts, and more worse, bloodshed in Africa.
As we leave COP28, we want to reiterate our call for UNFCCC to take back control of the processes from the global oil cartels and purveyors of delays for action. These cartels are causing harm to the world and their commitment to taking restitutive actions and adapting to change remains questionable. Despite all the noise and grandstanding that took place over the last two weeks, there are only two actions that are critical to our survival: eliminating fossil fuels, deep emission cuts, particularly in industrialized countries with the largest emissions, and finding ways to help developing and vulnerable countries adapt and build resilience to the adverse effects of climate change.
We are dedicated to forging impactful alliances and partnerships to achieve climate justice in Africa and globally.
Notes to Editors:
We draw the attention of editors to our comprehensive resources on COP to be accessed through https://cop.pacja.org/ and our overall position for COP that can be accessed through the site: African Civil Society position- UNFCCC-COP28 - PACJA - Panafrican Climate Justice Alliance
On 12/9/2023 11:39 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
" src="cid:part5.jvOCVyIw.b8gy45WV@mail.ngo.za" alt="" moz-do-not-send="false" class="Apple-web-attachment Apple-edge-to-edge-visual-media" align="right" style="opacity: 1;">(Barbara Creecy and Gwede Mantashe were targets outside the Durban Suncoast Casino owned by Johnny Copelyn - the main local ally of Shell and TotalEnergies - yesterday... and at more than a dozen sites of struggle right now. As the Dubai Conference of Polluters 28 becomes more farcical each day - in part thanks to the SA delegation - here's more on Creecy-Mantashe permissions for worsening SA fossil and especially meth gas addictions.)
List of Upcoming Nationwide Protest Actions Against Oil and Gas Drilling Off South African Coastline
(MyPR.co.za) December 6, 2023 By // by Alan Straton Filed Under: Environment, Featured Edit This Article
South Africa: On Saturday, 9 December, people across the country will unite in local actions against oil and gas drilling off the South African coastlines. Multinational corporations, including Shell, Qatar, Total Energies and contractors such as CGG and Searcher, are amongst the focal points of the latest round of public outrage.
Recent authorisations which have catalysed action are the:
- Recent authorisation by the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) for UK-based CGG to conduct a speculative 3D seismic survey in the Algoa/Outeniqua Basin off the Southeast Coast of South Africa (appeals open to DFFE before 13th December 2023)
- Recent decision by the Minister of DFFE to reject an environmental appeal off the West Coast, meaning seismic surveys by Searcher are planned to start after 1 January 2024 unless it is taken to court.
- Recent decision by the Minister of DFFE to reject the environmental appeal against oil and gas exploration in blocks 567 (from Gansbaai on the South Coast to Doring Baai on the West Coast). Which means Total Energies can start drilling anytime from now unless it is taken to court.
Authorisation Amid Controversy:
The local actions are taking place on the same day as the global day for climate justice in line with COP28 in which the global climate justice movement is coming together to continue to advocate for a fast and fair phase out of fossil fuels. The international conference which is meant to be a place for making equitable progress on climate change and energy transitions, has been steeped in controversy and disappointment while the COP28 president, Sultan Al Jaber, has been accused of abusing his position to try to sign oil deals.
Communities, environmental activists, civil society organisations, and legal experts have expressed concern over the lack of public consultation and proper processes being followed around the exploration authorisations. Of particular concern is the impact that these surveys will have on the livelihoods of small scale fishing communities and those in the tourism sector, marine life such as turtles, fish, whales and plankton, as well as local coastal economies which are founded on healthy marine environments.
Contradiction with International Recommendations
The International Energy Agency (IEA) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports have underscored the need for urgent action to reduce fossil fuel use over the next 20 years and have stated that no oil, gas or coal projects can come online if we are to limit catastrophic global warming and climate change. South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission’s (PCC) electricity recommendations have also aligned with the urgency of transitioning to renewable energy swiftly and justly.
Call to Action:
As fishing communities, civil society, environmentalists, and concerned people unite nationwide on December 9 to voice opposition to the potentially devastating consequences of these proposed oil and gas activities, they are calling on people to join them in actions against oil and gas exploration off the South African coast.
Some of the groups and organisations organising actions include: Plettenberg Bay Community Environment Forum, Green Connection, Oceans Not Oil, Algoa Bay Ocean Stewards, Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace Africa, Save the Wild Coast, African Climate Alliance, Eastern Cape Environmental Network, Masifundise, Coastal Links South Africa, Eden to Addo Corridor Initiative, Nature’s Valley Trust, Tsitsikamma Fishers Forum, WESSA Algoa Bay & Eden Branches, 7784 Performers Youth Development, Robberg Coastal Corridor Protected Environment, The Green Net, Helderberg Ocean Awareness Movement, Project 90 by 2030, Sustaining the Wild Coast NPC, SAFC – South African Fishers Collective, One Ocean Hub, CJN – Climate Justice Network, SAFCEI – Southern African Faith Communities Environment Institute, Fossil Free SA
List Of Protest Actions On 9 December 2023 Include:
Location | Further Info and Contact
- Cape Town Muizenberg Beach | 10:00-12:00 – African Climate Alliance & Project 90×2023 Gabriel 079 306 8871; Isabelle Joubert EXR 082 387 9016; Stephen Maciko Right To Know 078 425 3215; Lydia Peterson SAFCEI 061 3489 941; Sarah Robyn Farrell Fossil Free SA & African Climate African – 083 409 5557 and Maria Welcome, Green Connection – 082 936 9199
- Plettenberg Bay | Info stand at Ocean Awareness Day, Central Beach, Plettenberg Bay 9:00-16:00, Group photo at 13:00 – Julie Carlisle – CGG appeal process – 082 322 2209
- Mtwalume | Mfazazane beach, Mtwalume, KZN – 10:00-12:00; Bangiswa – 0780 580 422 Mnafu fishing co-operative
- Knysna | Meet opposite Shell Garage, 44 Main Rd, Knysna 12:00-14:00 – Julie and Barend Julie: 065 562 1850 Barend 061 723 7302
- Chintsa East, Eastern Cape | Main Beach 10:30 – Lisa Cloete 084 067 7149
- Sedgefield | Wild Oats side of the Sedgefield Market – in front of entrance – 7:30 – 11:15; Nikki Jackman Joy 083 700 7947
- Mtunzini | Main beach 9:00 – Contact: Claire Campbell 0727178806
- Saldanha | Pepper Bay Harbour 10:00-12:00 – Carmelita Mostert 084 756 2203; Carmen Aboriginal 072 551 2182; Hilda SA Fisher’s collective 063 691 9112; Wendy Pekeur Ubuntu Rural Women and Youth Movement 060 624 3215
- Langebaan & St Helena Bay | Pepper Bay Harbour – Solene Smith 071 774 8838 Coastal Links; Cilla Small-scale fisher 073 994 8156
- Durban | Suncoast Beach to Ushaka Beach – Meet at 9:00; Desiree – 065 850 2722
- Port St Johns | Mngazi Beach 10:00-13:00 – Ntsindiso Nongcavu – 072 073 6228 Eastern Cape Coastal Links
- Gqeberha | New Brighton Beach 9:00-11:00 – Gary Koekemoer 071 610 2884; Kevin Taylor WESSA – 079 494 1092; Irna Centre for Integrated Post School Education and Training – 083 951 6119; Zukisa ECEN – 072 202 5098
- Cape St Francis | Cape St Francis Beach 9:00-11:00 – Juliette – 083 656 4319
- Joburg/Pretoria | Banners on bridges – Uncial Haupt 082 497 3712
- Port Alfred – Jo Styles 0844074067
- Paternoster | Meet outside die winkel op paternoster 10:00-11:00
- Port Nolloth | 10:00 – 12:00 pm; Walter Steenkamp 084 087 5199
- Port Alfred | Kowie Small Scale Fishers Co-op and Marselle Small Scale Fishers Co-op Port Alfred, 10am – Taryn Pereira 0822936380 / Volenta Marais 0612578964
- Kenton-on-Sea | Kenton, Middle Beach Moeg Gesukkel Small Scale Fishers Co-op 10 am – Melisa Pullen 0833938670 / Taryn Pereira 0822936380
- Hamburg | Siyaphambili SSF co-op and Siyazama co-op 10am – Ayanda Yekani 0781525982 / Taryn Pereira 0822936380
Durban beachfront - Johnny Copelyn's Suncoast Casino - on 8 December
***
Call to protest against oil and gas extraction
The Climate Justice Charter Movement said the public needs to fight from all fronts such as mass actions, appealing to the government, taking legal action against the licences, signing petitions and building a mass movement to defend life-enabling systems.
December 8, 2023
NTANDOYENKOSI DLAMINI 2 minutes read
The Climate Justice Charter Movement (CJCM) at a recent protest.
The Climate Justice Charter Movement (CJCM) is calling on local and international organisations to protest in their respective communities against oil and gas extraction in the ocean on December 9.
In a statement on Tuesday this week, the movement said the public needs to fight from all fronts such as communities rolling out mass actions, appealing to the government, taking legal action against the licences, signing petitions and building a mass movement to defend life-enabling systems.
It added that seismic surveys and offshore oil and gas rigs have been extensively studied, saying that their detrimental impacts on marine life are well-documented.
The movement said it wants to start coordinating for rolling mass action from December 9 until May 2024 to show collective mass power.
“Our Rights Of Nature Policy which is informed by fisherfolk and coastal communities calls for the defence of our oceans and the rejection of ocean trawlers, seismic surveys and carbon capital activities that destroy our oceans. These activities pose significant threats to the delicate balance of underwater ecosystems. It is clear, however, that the ANC-led alliance does not care about fisherfolk, does not care about coastal communities and does not care about the climate crisis. We, the people must unite to defend our oceans, to defend coastal communities and to defend the right of marine species to live and thrive without being blasted by air guns every second,” read the statement.
It added: “As a movement, we firmly reject the capture of our oceans by multinational corporations who want to loot our ocean commons for oil and gas. In our campaigning with SAFSC since 2014, we have continually argued that there can be no food sovereignty and no climate justice if the oceans are captured by corporations. The struggles of coastal communities have been ignored by the mainstream media. Denying these communities access to the sea is denying their rights, their heritage, and their culture and basically, it is a form of carbon apartheid.”
The statement further read that CJCM supports December 9 as a day of action.
“Endorse the Climate Justice Charter ( here: https://cjcm.org.za/endorse ). Join the Climate Justice Charter Movement. Oil and gas extraction is one part of the larger climate justice struggle,” read the statement.
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DURBAN REPORT
Global Day of Action Statement
08 December 2023
People and communities worldwide are experiencing the horrific conditions of multiple crises on top of long-standing injustices, inequalities and oppression. The climate crisis is causing extreme weather events and disrupting ecosystems. Those already suffering impoverishment, discrimination and exploitation are the most vulnerable to this crisis and have the least access to necessary resources to deal with its impacts. The climate crisis also exacerbates other crises - furthering impoverishment and deepening inequalities. Millions of people have lost lives, homes, jobs and livelihoods. Billions face food and water scarcity, health risks, and unrelenting climate-induced loss and damage.
Community members from KwaZulu Natal gathered at the Diakonia Council of Churches to participate in the Counter COP Climate Week hosted by the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) and groundWork. The theme for the week was Phasing Out Fossil Fuels. We covered the following themes: Coal, Oil & gas, harmful developments in South Africa, Industrialized forests and carbon markets, Global and local politics of climate, Just Energy Transition and system change. Speakers from Earthlife Africa, Amadiba Crisis Committee, WaterCAN, Centre for Natural Resource Governance, Natural Justice, groundWork, Urban Futures Centre (UFC), Centre for Environmental Rights (CER), Vukani Environmental Movement (VEM), Women's Leadership and Training Programme (WLTP), and Geasphere. Mobilising on the ground around local issues facing people in KZN remains critical, where we can empower the communities with knowledge and lessons learned and ensure that we take people with us in a just transition toward a sustainable future.
Conference Of Parties 28 (COP28) should provide a critical opportunity to escalate our fight for climate justice and system change and raise long-standing demands for real solutions. However, COP 1 -28 have delivered no tangible results and has failed people and the planet. Having COP 28 in the UAE clearly depicts that COP has been captured, silencing the voices of communities on the front lines of the climate crisis. The delay in implementation and financing loss and damage to people directly impacted and the associated infrastructure cannot be adequately quantified.
Today, we have joined actions globally and at the COP28 venue to expose the failures of government, corporations and elites to evade their responsibilities and obligations and compel them to advance towards tangible solutions. We, the people, communities, movements, people’s organisations, workers, and civil society networks around the globe, come together to escalate actions on the ground for system change!
Let people decide
The government must uphold and respect the accepted case law judgement of free, prior and informed consent for all communities impacted by extractive oil and gas projects. This must be included in all government and corporate project practices. There must be strict penalties for any company that transgresses free prior and informed consent procedures. As stated in NEMA, Chapter 1, “the participation of all interested and affected parties in environmental governance must be promoted, and all people must have the opportunity to develop the understanding, skills and capacity necessary for achieving equitable and effective participation, and participation by vulnerable and disadvantaged persons must be ensured”.
Communities must be given the right to say no to Oil and gas-related projects per the Xolobeni judgement. They must be given the authority to deny these developments if they believe they threaten their health or well-being, as is enshrined in section 24 of our constitution. This includes the right to a sustainable and just alternative form of development. Corporations must be held accountable and have their license to operate revoked for failing to deliver on their social labour plans or for violating other laws and regulations that harm the well-being of their workers, surrounding communities and ecosystems.
Implement an action plan for a just energy transition
An immediate redirection of regressive subsidies for coal, oil and gas. Funding must be redirected towards a mass rollout of clean renewable energy generation to provide affordable access to electricity beginning in low-income households.
The Integrated Resource Plan must be reviewed to remove constraints on renewable energy, work to phase out all existing fossil fuel generation sources in line with South Africa’s fair share of keeping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius and contain no new fossil fuel generation build.
Polluting corporations must pay for the damage caused and be held accountable for ecological restoration by implementing taxes and various transparent applications of financial provision regulations. Robust, Just Transition policies must be implemented to protect workers and communities who would otherwise be negatively impacted so they can thrive in a more socially and ecologically just future. A mass skills, jobs and training programme to create opportunities for the people of South Africa. It must be guided by the One Million Climate campaign and prioritise youth and women. These jobs must guarantee adequate living wages, and financial support must be offered to displaced workers during the transition.
KZN has many informal trading sites and retail markets that, if managed well, will provide opportunities for people. Markets and informal sites are meant to be business hubs and major shopping attractions for guests in the country. These facilities should start moving towards “greener trading, " which means recycling, renewable energy and solar options.
Green hydrogen is promoted under the guise of renewable energy but is, in fact, a false solution. Hydrogen developments in southern Africa have followed the same methods of extractivism for the benefit of Global North countries. Communities have experienced threats of land grabs, water resource conflicts, and destruction of local livelihoods. Individual projects have been fast-tracked using government instruments such as Strategic Infrastructure Project (SIP) status, where timelines for public participation and consultation with affected communities have been drastically reduced. There is the underlying threat of fossil gas being used to produce grey hydrogen or mixed with green hydrogen; therefore, fossil fuel companies have a significant interest in pushing this new energy carrier.
Energy sovereignty is a crucial principle for systems change. It is fundamental to the transition to a just society, where communities can choose their energy to be clean, renewable, and low-cost. Communities should be able to participate and shape the decision-making of their future energy generation and use. This is fundamentally Community-owned and led Renewable Energy. We also need to promote and further the aims of energy access for all, fighting the scourge of energy poverty through interventions that benefit the poor and disenfranchised.
Food and Food Sovereignty
Food is a form of energy. It is fundamental to human life, and it is a human right. Food availability is the result of systems of land ownership, access to water, seeds, skills, knowledge, market opportunities, and opportunities for autonomous food production. It is crucial for well-being in a society. The current dominant food system is profit-driven and relies heavily on the need for fossil fuels. This creates opportunities for a new food system.
An end to monoculture industrial food processes which are carbon intensive and toxic, and need large amounts of artificial fertilisers and pesticides. Water and land reform to support emerging farmers. This must prioritise land ownership for women. Localisation at every level of food production to cope with climate change and increased droughts. The reduction of water waste by large-scale irrigation and large-scale agroindustries. A move away from water-intensive extractive and industrial activities. Strict monitoring of water users such as fracking, coal mining, industrialised farming. A focused food policy, aimed at ensuring food sovereignty for all.
Living with climate impacts
Climate change mitigation and adaptation are not separate, for example agro-ecology produces food, restores the soil and can absorb carbon from the atmosphere. But regardless of the success of the Just Transition and climate change mitigation measures, it is inevitable that we will have to live with and adapt to increasingly dangerous climate change impacts. All planning processes, including land use planning and infrastructure, and service delivery planning, must account and prepare for the impacts of climate change. Municipalities and provinces must be properly resourced for climate adaptation.
Health
The burning of fossil fuels in the production of energy, and the air pollution that it produces, is the leading cause of climate change and one of the world’s greatest health risks. Providing clean energy to everyone who needs it will dramatically improve the climate, as well as human health and economy. Our health has been injured by our society’s reliance on fossil fuels. The health system is already in crisis and needs radical proactive change to be able to cope with current public health challenges, as well as the current and anticipated damages induced by slow onset and rapid climate change events.
Internalising the health costs of coal and other fossil fuels to the polluters’ accounts. Providing active and accountable leadership to urgently acknowledge and address the ongoing public health disaster caused by unsafe levels of air pollution in South Africa. The effective and transparent monitoring of health data related to environmental health.
Local service delivery and open democracy
Local government is the level of government closest to the people and their immediate concerns. It has a crucial role to play in building and supporting the resilience of infrastructure as well as the people it serves. It is the first line of defence in terms of disaster management. Proper local services should build people’s resilience, reconstruct and climate-proof settlements, fix broken roads, stormwater drains, water and sewage pipes, street lighting, and provide proper municipal services (including wastewater treatment works), water, use renewables such as solar water heaters, and be based on accountability and participation.
Local governments that work with people,Local government is clear on how to deliver Constitutional Rights (such as health, sanitation, etc.) and basic services. The creation of local jobs to support residents. Local government that prepares for the impacts of climate change. People should not be living in floodplains, and communities are water resilient.
List of our demands:
- We, the people of KZN, demand that the government and industries in communities decommission their facilities and rehabilitate the polluted land. Repurposing the land to facilitate Just Energy Transitions centres for training for upskilling and reskilling communities and workers.
- Redressing past wrongs by consulting with people before deciding on significant developments. Spatial planning processes must involve communities by prioritising the needs and wants of the people. All decisions should be made from the perspective of intergenerational justice. The interests of those still to be born should be taken into account.
- Government must not take decisions behind closed doors but communicate with community members regarding land, water, air, energy;
- Health resilience for communities to build mental health support, contribute to wellbeing, healthy food systems, quality medicines, and management of public facilities that are accessible to the community;
- Rapid, just and equitable phaseout of all fossil fuels, including exploration, extraction, transportation, production and consumption, and a direct, rapid, equitable and just transition to democratic, renewable energy systems for people and communities that builds energy sovereignty;
- Fulfillment of obligations to deliver adequate, new, additional, non-debt creating, conditionality-free climate finance for mitigation and just transition, adaptation and Loss and Damage as part of Reparations;
- Cancelation of unsustainable and illegitimate debt being collected from the Global South;
- Immediate end to greenwashing and false, harmful and unproven "solutions" which serve as dangerous and deceptive distractions, including geoengineering, carbon capture and storage technologies, and carbon markets;
- Building just, resilient and sustainable food systems; upholding and protecting people’s right to food and food sovereignty.
- Respect for and protection of human rights - of civil and political rights, of economic, environmental, social and cultural rights including the right to public services and social protection for all, the right to clean, health and sustainable environment, the rights of all workers including migrant workers, the rights of peasants and fishers, the rights of women, the right to gender diversity, the rights of black, indigenous and people of color, the rights of youth and children;
- The fulfillment of gender justice as an integral part of climate justice; Advance on gender-equality and care economies that prioritize well-being, care and authentic education over profit and address ongoing economic disparities and social injustices resulting from colonia, capitalist and patriarchal legacies where socially constructed roles and sectors prevail;
- Defund and divest from the destructive and heavily polluting military industrial complex; and divest from police- and military-reliant climate policy, and invest in climate emergency care;
- Equitable and just transition from a capitalist and extractivist economic system to post-carbon local, national and global economic systems that are inclusive, sustainable, democratic and uphold all human and labor rights.
For more information please contact:
Shanice Firmin - shanice@sdceango.co.za / 081 799 0971
Desmond D’Sa - desmond@sdceango.co.za / 083 982 6939
Yeheshni Moodley - yegeshni@groundwork.org.za
***
Activists demand end to TotalEnergies offshore drilling
The French multinational company wants to drill for oil and gas along the coastline near Cape Town, the West Coast and the Garden Route
4 November 2023 | By Qaqamba Falithenjwa Brief | Cape Town
Environmental activists came together to picket outside Parliament to oppose TotalEnergies’ offshore drilling for oil and gas. Photo: Qaqamba Falintenjwa
While Springbok supporters were painting the city centre green in Cape Town on Friday, environmental activists picketed outside Parliament to oppose TotalEnergies’ offshore drilling for oil and gas.
Members of Extinction Rebellion 350 Africa, Green Connection, Project 90 by 2030, and African Climate Alliance chanted “phantsi ngoTotal” and “Umhlaba ngowethu, ulwandle lolwethu” which means, “Land is ours, the sea is ours.”
The French multinational company wants to drill for oil and gas along the South African coastline near Cape Town, the West Coast and the Garden Route.
In September, the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) rejected the appeals against TotalEnergies’ application to drill off the coast between Cape Town and Cape Agulhas. The company is also setting its sights on offshore drilling in the Deep Water Orange Basin off the West Coast between Port Nolloth and Hondeklip Bay, for which the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) has already granted the company exploration rights.
TotalEnergies also plans to drill between Mossel Bay and Cape St Francis which is currently in its public participation stage.
Glen Tyler-Davies, a member of 350 Africa, said, “We are trying to power up climate justice and renewable energy. We have an amazing opportunity to not only avoid the impacts of climate change but also to power up community and social owned energy through renewable energy. Our parliamentarians need to seize this opportunity and stop the destruction.”
Tyler-Davies said they expect Parliament to stop companies from exploiting the environment.
Community Coordinator for Green Connection, Neville van Rooy, said, “We were shocked to hear of these decisions. We have the right to a clean ocean.”
Van Rooy said these oil and gas ventures are to run for about 20 years which will put Africa in a climate crisis. “There are cleaner alternatives that we can use. Why are we not harnessing them instead of having fossil fuels forced on us?” he asked.
Among their demands was for oil and gas explorations to be halted immediately.
Their memorandum was handed to Masibulele Xhaso, Secretary to the National Assembly. He said, “We will make sure that it is taken through the necessary processes and refer it to the relevant committees.”
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Energy poverty used to justify corporate greed
Promise of liberalisation is beginning to fade as large players start to dominate renewable energy
20 October 2023 - 05:00
by Editorial
The self-congratulatory atmosphere at the African Energy Week in Cape Town was stifling. But given that delegates were there to explain why Africa must and shall exploit its yet untapped fossil fuel reserves, climate change be damned, one must assume some suffocation by propaganda was right on theme.
Nary a speaker could resist the temptation to remind the audience of eager investors that all of this is really for the poor.
True, energy poverty is a major developmental challenge on the continent. In Sub-Saharan Africa, almost half the population is without access to electricity. Fossil fuels will have to play a part, one way or another, in getting electricity to every home in Africa.
But when the diamond and platinum sponsors of your conference include TotalEnergies, Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP, it is clear whose interests are really being represented.
Here the renewable energy industry is starting to show some similarity to fossil fuels.
One of the exciting promises of renewable energy, a true liberalisation of the energy market, is starting to fade as the industry slowly becomes dominated by larger players. This is partly just due to economies of scale, but also because of poor and slow policy development.
In SA we can already see how this might crowd out smaller players and derail plans for community-owned projects that, unlike vague promises to end energy poverty, could be a direct benefit for the poor.
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13
SHARES
Energy, oil, gas and uranium
‘SA can become an oil and gas exporter’ – CEF chair
New legislation to bring regulatory certainty, limit litigation.
By Moneyweb 16 Oct 2023 04:02
GRINDRODR10.94 1.20% 10/13/2023, 5:00:52 PM
SASOLR265.95 2.17% 10/13/2023, 5:00:00 PM
BEE-SASOLR160.00 10/13/2023, 4:48:01 PM
The Kinetiko Energy gas find near Sasol's Secunda plant is significant for at least three of Eskom’s coal-fired power stations, says Ayanda Noah. Image: Supplied
Listen to this article
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South Africans tend to undervalue the country’s oil and gas resources, but investment in the development of these resources may amount to more than R200 billion in the next three to four years.
The environment is however extremely litigious, which hampers the development of the resources that could be the game-changer the country needs to resolve its energy crisis and kickstart economic growth to address poverty, says Central Energy Fund (CEF) chair Ayanda Noah.
Read: Government wants oil and gas exploration accelerated
She says the critical Upstream Petroleum Resources Development Bill that has already been approved by the parliamentary portfolio committee for mineral resources and energy will bring regulatory certainty and limit the amount of litigation.
The bill is aimed at the orderly development of the country’s petroleum resources.
The portfolio committee has completed public consultations in all provinces, and Noah hopes the bill will be finalised next year.
The country also needs more refinery capacity since the PetroSA facility in Mossel Bay is currently standing idle. However she hopes a partnership for the refurbishment of the refinery will be announced before the end of the financial year. That will enable the recommissioning within two years.
Noah, a professional engineer with decades of experience in the energy sector, has been mentioned as one of the candidates to possibly take on the Eskom CEO position.
She says gas has been classified as an appropriate resource in the just energy transition, and the recent discovery of 4.9 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of gas by Kinetiko Energy near Secunda is significant for at least three of Eskom’s coal-fired power stations in Mpumalanga.
Read/listen:
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The find is near the Rompco pipeline, which transports gas from Mozambique to Sasol’s Secunda plant. The pipeline also runs close to the power stations and can be used to transport gas to for those operations to use instead of coal. The CEF has an interest in the pipeline through its subsidiary, EGoli Gas.
Noah says she has seen how the Chinese have converted old coal-fired power stations to use gas instead.
They basically demolish the existing plant and build a new one from scratch. In China this was done at a 1 800MW plant in 18-24 months “and that was during Covid”. “Now it can happen even faster”
She says as an engineer she knows renewable energy such as solar and wind power cannot provide baseload and gas is needed to stabilise the system, together with nuclear and clean coal.
Read: China’s plan to fix SA’s logistics and energy crises
According to the Petroleum Agency of South Africa, also a subsidiary of the CEF, the country has resources totalling 27 billion barrels (bbl) of oil and 60 tcf of gas offshore and a further 200 tcf onshore, including shale gas.
For a sense of scale, Noah says Mossgas produced 46 000 barrels per day and was in operation for 28 years on the back of a resource of 1.5 tcf. It produced petrol, diesel, jet fuel, paraffin and liquified petroleum gas (LPG).
It is important to note that the Pande and Temane gas fields in Mozambique – which have supplied Sasol’s Secunda plant and other users in South Africa since 2004 – prompted the construction of the 865km long Rompco pipeline on the back of the 3.5 tcf find. It is however expected to be depleted in another three years.
About 20 000MW of generation capacity (almost half of Eskom’s total capacity) requires 24 tcf of gas.
Read: Mozambique’s vast gas fields will fuel growth, says Grindrod
“Gas to power is a massive opportunity, as is producing our own petroleum products,” says Noah.
Import risks
Although all the attention is on the electricity crisis at the moment, the country is also running a huge risk regarding oil and gas. “We import almost everything”, which exposes the country to geopoliticial risks.
Noah says SA developing its own resources will also improve the balance of payments and create much-needed jobs.
“While the exploration and development of oil and gas resources requires massive amounts of money, the benefits are so big that it makes sense to consider partnerships. The resources are available, and it will further climate change goals.
“There are many potential partners,” she says, including from Arab countries and current and future Brics partners.
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Noah says the viability of a new refinery on the Cape West Coast has been confirmed by the discovery of 11 bbl of oil in the Orange River basin in Namibian waters. It borders on South African waters within the same geological structure and bodes well for similar finds on this side of the border.
These finds can underpin the development of a new refinery on the West Coast which will reduce South Africa’s dependence on imports, and give it more control over prices.
Source: Petroleum Agency SA
Noah says the 3 tcf Total gas field in the sea near Mossel Bay could be in operation in the next three to four years.
Based on the available resources, South Africa may even in future export petroleum products to the rest of the continent, she adds.
Source: Central Energy Fund
Read:
Africa’s newest oil jackpot comes with a corruption curse
Namibia plans $2.1bn port expansion for oil developments
TotalEnergies CEO says Namibia oil discovery could be a ‘giant’
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