How to assess the outcome of COP28

Actionism. That word greeted arriving passengers at Dubai International Airport, the port of entry for the vast majority of the 100,000 or so climate negotiators, activists, industry lobbyists, and others attending this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) and the events around it.  

This attempt to rebrand an everyday word encapsulates COP28, one of the most surreal climate summits to date. Between Dubai’s ostentatious fossil-fuelled wealth, misguided car-centric city planning, and the fact that COP28 itself was led by a fossil-fuel CEO, it has been much easier than in prior years to be cynical about the whole exercise. 

But cynicism will not help us address climate change, and while it was tough to spot amid all the greenwashing, there was some real progress on the ground. Two weeks before the conference, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) opened the world’s largest single-site solar plant, with two gigawatts of panels spanning 20 square kilometres and powering almost 200,000 energy-hogging UAE homes for $1.32 per kilowatt-hour – one of the lowest prices for electricity anywhere delivered at this scale. 

Nor is this the only development to applaud. The renewables lobby is celebrating a pledge, supported by 118 governments, to triple global renewable-energy capacity and double the annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030. The nuclear industry also has reason to cheer, with 22 governments pledging to triple global nuclear-energy capacity by 2050. Both commitments are good news for the climate. The world needs both renewables and nuclear in order to cut fossil-fuel use quickly. 

Precisely because the world needs to cut fossil-fuel use altogether, it is more difficult to evaluate another pledge made this month to reduce methane (CH4). While carbon dioxide (CO2) is the biggest overall climate culprit, CH4 will be responsible for as much as 45 percent of the planetary warming this decade .

So it was much more than just well-timed symbolism when the US Environmental Protection Agency announced on December 2 that it had finalised a long-awaited rule to cut CH4 emissions from the oil and gas sector by around 80 percent over 15 years. That news came with a $1b commitment to help smaller countries address the same problem, leading several to join the Global Methane Pledge to cut total CH4 emissions 30 percent by 2030. And all this comes on the heels of an EU law that sets tight CH4 leakage standards.  

December 2 also brought a major industry announcement. Around 50 of the world’s largest oil and gas firms – including ExxonMobil, Shell, SaudiAramco, and ADNOC (the company led by Sultan al Jaber, the COP28 president) – pledged to all but eliminate their own CH4 emissions. 

Climate campaigners are understandably questioning the industry’s motives, and emphasizing that such pledges could detract from the need to cut both CH4 and CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel use, not merely from its production. 

None of that diminishes the real, positive effects that would come from slashing CH4 emissions this decade. But the question of how useful the COP process has been raises an even broader, almost philosophical one: How should we think about CO2, CH4, or any other emissions reductions that are ostensibly “costless” from a narrow technical perspective, but that have yet to happen? 

After all, oil and gas companies here are committing to stop wasting gas, one of their two main products. Ideally, it would not take the performative circus of COP to achieve these kinds of agreements. Yet, as the CH4 pledge shows, apparently it does.

The problem is that coordinating pledges across industry players, civil society, and governments to measure, report, verify, and ultimately enforce action via a unified set of standards takes time and effort. 

There are clear hurdles to overcome, even with seemingly costless emissions reductions that industries themselves have an interest in adopting. The key task for international gatherings, as for low-carbon technologies themselves, is to focus on getting costs down, and fast. 

-- Project Syndicate