What a climate breakthrough would look like

The effort’s credibility suffers when goals and pledges often require unprecedented efforts and offer little clue about how they will be financed.

This appeared in The Washington Post:

Diplomats gathered in Dubai are working hard to convince the world that the United Nations’ 28th climate summit, which ended Wednesday, was a decisive success.

Big oil producers in the Middle East and beyond agreed to consider paring back the use of fossil fuels. There was a collective promise to invest a lot more in renewable energy. And everybody pledged to write new plans to cut carbon emissions more quickly, starting in 2025.

But it may be hard to convey to the rest of the world how the “UAE Consensus” that emerged from the two-week conclave in the United Arab Emirates could be construed as a bold step forward in the battle against climate change.

The takeaways from the U.N. affair for the average citizen of the world: Countries are not on track to hit the global climate targets they set in previous summits; these targets are not enough to prevent warming in excess of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages, the ostensible goal; everybody will propose new targets in a couple of years. Yet the conference’s conclusions on how to make progress from here are so vague that their promise seems empty.

The crucial Item 28 of the global stocktake document that world climate negotiators approved recognizes the “need for deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in line with 1.5 °C pathways” and calls on countries “to contribute.” But the “global efforts” countries are meant to contribute to can be interpreted widely.

Consider “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.” This language on fossil fuels is probably the main achievement of the entire conclave. And yet, one should note that the effort is toward taking them out of “energy systems,” meaning electric power grids — not cars, trucks and airplanes, which, for instance, account for 70 percent of oil consumption in the United States.

“Accelerating the reduction of emissions from road transport” counts as a different effort that, unlike that for “energy systems,” does not mention a target of “net zero” emissions by 2050. Airplanes — which before the pandemic emitted about 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year — are not mentioned.

Many of the goals and pledges offered in Dubai are laudable. They would, collectively, help move the world to a new low-emissions equilibrium. It is positive to see nations commit to investigate a broad variety of technologies, including nuclear energy, carbon capture and storage, and low-carbon hydrogen.

Still, the effort’s credibility suffers when goals and pledges often require unprecedented efforts and offer little clue about how they will be financed. It doesn’t help either that, so far, the world is failing to hit targets set before.

Tripling the installed capacity of renewable energy by 2030, for instance, would be a good thing. And yet, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency, that is more than double the commitments made so far by the large countries in the Group of 20.

Ultimately, perhaps the most useful outcome of the climate summit is the inevitable conclusion that the world’s climate goals, as stated, will not be met.

Item 66, for instance, explains that developing countries need $5.8 trillion to $5.9 trillion by 2030 just to pay for mitigation and adaptation efforts in their climate pledges so far. Yet the document offers no clue about viable sources of finance at this scale.

The shortcomings are most obvious when talking about the central goal: to keep warming under the ceiling of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Item 27 points out that greenhouse gas emissions must be cut 43 percent by 2030, compared to 2019, and 60 percent by 2035. Yet despite a pandemic that squelched carbon emissions, they only declined by half a percentage point between 2019 and 2021.

The agreement climate negotiators embraced this week calls for countries to present new road maps by 2025 that will put them on a path to hit net zero emissions by 2050 and keep warming under the ceiling. At this point, meeting that goal looks extremely unlikely, a reality that should adjust how nations plan; along with big spending on renewables, backup options such as investing in technology that pulls greenhouse emissions directly from the air or “geoengineering” hacks that help cool the planet look more reasonable. The real breakthrough would be for countries to bring more ambition to the table in 2025 — and back it up with lots more money.