An oily climate deal

00:00
Speaker 1
It's easy to look at a climate conference being held in an oil rich country being run by oil rich people and think cynical thoughts.

00:09
Speaker 2
I think history records will show that in 2023 for COP 28, we let a mosquito lead the fight against malaria.

00:18
Speaker 1
But then they actually pulled something off.

00:20
Speaker 2
For the first time ever in 30 years, almost 28 years, to be exact, of doing these climate negotiations, every country in the world agreed to transition away from fossil fuels.

00:32
Speaker 3
History has been made at COP 28 in Dubai.

00:35
Speaker 1
This is the first time the final agreement actually uses the words fossil fuels. Tim McDonald was in Dubai covering the big moment for semaphore, where he's their climate editor.

00:46
Speaker 2
This is really unprecedented, and there's certainly plenty of things in the agreement that people can quibble with and we can talk about those we will. The hard part comes in making this a reality. What do you have to do to implement that?

00:57
Speaker 1
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Speaker 2
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Speaker 3
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02:28
Speaker 2
Judy explained.

02:34
Speaker 1
Okay, so before we get to a historic step forward and the realities of implementation, which I know are plenty complex in their own right, I want to talk about just all of the drama going into this conference. How was that particular drama different from, say, climate conferences past?

02:53
Speaker 2
Yeah, well, you did have a really interesting and certainly controversial setting of United Arab Emirates hosting this summit. This is a big oil and gas producing nation. You had a person, Sultan Al Jabur, who was the chairman of the national oil company ADNoc, as the summit president.

03:14
Speaker 1
The president of an energy company was in charge of the climate conference.

03:18
Speaker 2
Yes, that's right.

03:20
Speaker 4
To address this question. Right. Let me first introduce myself to you. I'm an engineer by background. It's the science and my respect to the science and my passion about the science, and it's about my conviction to the science that have enabled me to progress in my career.

03:38
Speaker 2
And that certainly has been something that's got a lot of people riled up. Over the last year, the oil and.

03:43
Speaker 4
Gas industry made a mistake in overreaching and naming the CEO of one of the largest and one of the dirtiest, by many measures oil companies in the world. As the president of the cop, a.

03:59
Speaker 2
Lot of people had a lot of questions about this, for obvious reasons, about his credibility coming into this process. And there's been some minor scandals along the way. There was some leaked documents that came out near the beginning of the summit from his marketing team about potentially trying to use side meetings during the cop conference to sign oil and gas deals.

04:22
Speaker 4
Leaked documents obtained by the BBC and the center for Climate Reporting show that in meetings with at least 27 foreign governments arranged as part of the climate process, Dr. Jabba was briefed to discuss business deals for these state firms, which.

04:39
Speaker 1
That's the kind of thing that could make people want to pull out their hair when they read reporting that says at the climate conference, on which the whole world is staking the future of the planet, they're making oil and gas deals. But you're a climate reporter. How beyond the pale is that, really?

04:56
Speaker 2
Obviously, it sounds ridiculous. Although I will say, and I mean to be fair, this is one of the world's biggest national oil companies. I don't think they don't need to host a cop summit to take meetings with counterparties that they want to do oil and gas deals with. This guy can call any of these people anytime and have whatever meeting to do deals that he wants. My read from having been here the last couple of weeks, and this may be a controversial opinion, is that I think that al Jabur has actually done quite a good job of organizing things here. And I think that his position as an oil executive, counterintuitively, may have been, in a way, just the thing that was needed at this particular moment in time. Wow.

05:42
Speaker 2
One thing that is really interesting and challenging about these cop summits, and which makes them different from a lot of processes in geopolitics, is that they require unanimous consent from every country for decisions to move forward. That means you have to get agreement from the US, China, India, Saudi Arabia, island, developing states, african countries, everything, right? They all have to agree on the same stuff. That's really hard to do on any subject, especially on energy and climate, where everybody has very different vested interests and expectations for what the outcome is going to be. And predictably, it is often the big oil and gas exporting countries that are intransigent on trying to get something out of this process that's ambitious enough to kind of rise to the level that science dictates we need to pursue action at.

06:38
Speaker 1
Why might african countries feel different from asian countries, feel different from north american countries, western european countries, what have you.

06:47
Speaker 2
You have a huge range of diversity between these countries in the level in which they produce or consume fossil fuels. And that's what we're talking about here. So you have countries like the US that do both. The world's biggest oil and gas producer and one of the biggest consumers, China, biggest consumer. You have emerging economies like Brazil or India that are massively ramping up consumption of fossil fuels. On the opposite side of that, you have the very poorest countries, the most climate vulnerable countries, small island states who have not been the cause of climate change, but are extremely vulnerable to the impacts of. It's an existential crisis for them, and they are often the ones leading the call for the most ambitious kind of outcome to come out of this sort of thing. I mean, this is really a crisis.

07:39
Speaker 5
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.

07:55
Speaker 2
And getting them to all agree on something is really challenging. And I actually think that the fact that you had an oil executive leading that conversation, especially an oil executive who, to be fair, the UAE has done more than most other Gulf oil exporting nations to diversify its economy away from oil and gas into other things, finance and real estate and many other things. I think he was able to make a compelling pitch to the kind of Saudi Arabia and similar countries of the world about why this transition, energy transition, is not going to leave them in the dust, because that's the problem we've had with all these previous cops. They come in, they don't see what's in it for them.

08:41
Speaker 4
I have said over and over that the phase down and the phase out of fossil fuel is inevitable. In fact, it is essential and this transition is, in fact, essential and it needs to be orderly, fair, just and responsible.

09:02
Speaker 2
That's the sort of calculus that I think he was able to pull off here in a way that was probably more credible with the most intransigent players than just about any other person I think probably could have done.

09:16
Speaker 1
So this is really interesting. So if you were casually following what's going on at this cop summit, it looks really bad. There are PowerPoint presentations that suggest that they were overtly trying to broker oil and gas deals on the side of this climate summit. This sultan al Jabber has come out, apparently, according to reporting, and said explicitly that he thinks that there is no science indicating that a phase out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5 degrees celsius. And yet you're saying here that he might have been one of the most ideal people to broker an agreement in this wildly diverse group of players.

09:58
Speaker 2
That's right. I know that it sounds kind of counterintuitive, and I'm sure that people listening to this are going to send me angry emails and tweets after they hear me say these things. But again, it's a diplomatic role that he has. He's not really there to sort of advance the UAE's own political position. But I think the elements of this agreement that sort of fall short of people's expectations for the most part have to do with encouraging the richest countries to provide more climate finance for the poorer ones, not setting very rigorous or specific goals for climate adaptation. People are upset about that. But the fossil fuel language specifically in that one sentence, transitioning away from fossil.

10:43
Speaker 3
Fuels and 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, which is.

10:56
Speaker 2
Really the kind of main decisive sentence that was going to shape the narrative around whether this was sort of a success or a failure, I think was quite strong. And I don't think that you would have gotten there with a lot of other people in that seat.

11:16
Speaker 1
Tim McDonald Semaphore, he's going to tell us what exactly is in this deal and how it's going to be enforced or whether it's going to be enforced at all when we're back on today.

11:25
Speaker 2
Explain.

11:36
Speaker 1
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15:44
Speaker 2
Explain.

15:47
Speaker 3
Secretary Perry, happy birthday.

15:50
Speaker 4
Thank you.

15:51
Speaker 3
Happy birthday. We're concerned your call to phase down fossil fuels is being watered down by a call to unonia missions. Will the US hold a line on phasing down fossil fuels by 2030 with no abatement loopholes?

16:01
Speaker 1
Climate activist Alice Hugh tracked down special presidential envoy for climate and brand new 80 year old John Kerry at COP 28.

16:10
Speaker 4
Well, we're going to do the best we can.

16:12
Speaker 3
Great. And on behalf of low income communities of color like the ones I organize in, that is really great to hear.

16:18
Speaker 4
Thank you.

16:18
Speaker 1
Alice Hughes activist work is funded in part by a group called the Climate Emergency Fund, which gives grants to what it calls disruptive climate activists. Margaret Klein Salomon is the group's executive director. We asked her what she thought of the big cop 28 deal, I mean.

16:37
Speaker 5
Including the phrase fossil fuels in the agreement. A phase down of fossil fuels is some kind of step forward. But you have to ask the question, would this agreement, if fully implemented, protect humanity and the living world from apocalyptic destruction? And the answer is very clearly no. So this is a non binding agreement that even if it were implemented fully, would still not protect us. So, yeah, I can't get excited about this.

17:15
Speaker 1
The reason Margaret can't get excited is because she's been psychoanalyzing the people who made this deal. No joke.

17:22
Speaker 5
As a clinical psychologist by training, I like to look at this in terms of normal mode versus emergency mode. Emergency mode is when an individual, group, or even entire country treats a situation like an actual existential risk. If we don't solve this, we will perish. And that is clearly not happening.

17:53
Speaker 1
Activist Margaret not impressed. Climate editor Tim kind of impressed.

17:58
Speaker 2
We've never had a cop agreement that specifically targets all fossil fuels and calls to transition away from them. That's totally unprecedented. The same sentence, by the way, gives this sort of caveat of doing this transition in a just, orderly and equitable manner, which I think is going to become a really important phrase, certainly for climate activists, but also for developing countries to sort of leverage in their continued call for climate finance from the rich countries to help them in this transition, and also to kind of set some expectations about the different pace that different countries need to go on in that transition. We don't need togo to shut down all of its fossil fuels in the same month that the US does.

18:46
Speaker 2
So everybody's going to kind of move at different paces and it's an equity issue because obviously there are many countries in the world for whom energy access, energy poverty are big issues and they may need to increase their use of fossil fuels in the near term as part of their development, economic development. So anyway, that's all kind of included in here. We also have not actually seen cop text that specifically puts this sort of deadline on 2050. Usually they talk about mid century, sort of like a wiggle term. So having 2050 as a hard deadline in there is quite important to reach net zero.

19:20
Speaker 1
Some caveats here about transitional fuels, about carbon capture, but a lot of groundbreaking stuff, at least for a cop summit. You got fossil fuels in there, you got equity in there, you got a hard deadline in there of 2050. Did everyone sign on to this? Is this a unanimous decision? A unanimous agreement?

19:41
Speaker 2
It is, yeah. I mean, that was, the gavel came down and that was it. Everybody signed on. So that's pretty remarkable.

19:48
Speaker 4
Hearing no objection. It is so decided.

19:54
Speaker 1
And this includes big old polluters like the United States, like China, like India.

19:58
Speaker 2
Like Russia, everybody, all of them.

20:00
Speaker 1
So then I guess the multi trillion dollar question is, how do you keep everyone accountable?

20:10
Speaker 2
Countries are supposed to come away from this process and implement their own national policies. So putting in place new laws or policies in their own countries that allow them to meet the goals that are laid out in this agreement. And then there's a kind of process for how countries kind of report those policies to each other and they're supposed to ratchet them up over time. And there's a sort of naming and shaming, transparency kind of element to this. You can't take somebody to the ICC or sue them or something if they don't a country, if they don't stand up to the commitment that they make here.

20:45
Speaker 1
Right. And you're also reminding us that countries like, let's say China aren't the most transparent about what's going on in China.

20:55
Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, of course there's going to be monitoring issues that go into this. Although one interesting side note from this conference was that you did see a lot of interesting developments or just sort of momentum or attention on satellite monitoring of emissions and remote sensing.

21:11
Speaker 1
This morning we're learning about a new way to find and reduce greenhouse gases that are warming our planet. Methane gas, which is usually invisible, can.

21:19
Speaker 2
Actually be seen in these infrared images. I think we're quickly arriving to a world where hidden greenhouse gas emissions are not going to be possible anymore. That's here already, actually, to a large extent. So this all just basically boils down to what do countries do on their own to make this happen? So for the US, examples are the Inflation Reduction act, the bipartisan infrastructure laws that came out in the US to subsidize renewable energy, and kind of other parts of the energy transition support the building of clean energy infrastructure. At the beginning of cop, you also saw the US announce new regulations on oil and gas methane emissions. Methane is a super potent greenhouse gas that's kind of gone unchecked, flown under the radar, so to speak, for a while.

22:05
Speaker 3
The US Environmental Protection Agency announced its final rule to prevent an estimated 58 million tons of methane emissions from 2024 to 2038. That's nearly 80% of our current output.

22:18
Speaker 2
So we have new legally binding regulations in the US on that. The US is also going to have new regulations on carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector coming probably in the first quarter of next year. So those are sort of examples of the types of national policies that actually kind of make this transition away from fossil fuels more likely to happen.

22:40
Speaker 1
I think a lot of people were betting against COP 28, not only because of the fossil fuel energy stakeholders in the mix, but also because this summit is happening at a time where countries are experiencing crippling inflation. And a lot of countries like the United States and even the United Kingdom that have set a lot of climate goals are rolling back on what they'd said they'd do and turning back to fossil fuels. How did they get everyone on board in such a precarious moment?

23:09
Speaker 2
Economically, I do think the macroeconomic context here is a sort of headwind or a challenge, although it's worth noting that the costs of renewable energy and energy storage and batteries, a lot of these other technologies are plummeting every year, and we're also seeing the costs of climate change. I mean, people are realizing if there's some cost associated with making this type of transition that it's well worth it because the costs of doing nothing are far higher. So that's the kind of reality that we're in now. I think one thing that's interesting here is to see how oil and gas companies navigate the sort of political signal that comes out of this cop. The reality, and this kind of goes back as well to your question about accountability and implementation for this. The reality is that oil demand is rising.

24:04
Speaker 2
What we need to kind of see is what else governments can do to intervene on the demand front, because until we bend that demand curve, we're not going to really see the acceleration of the transition that we want to see.

24:18
Speaker 1
And what happens when governments change. I mean, you're talking about the United States being an important player in setting these goals, in following through. But of course, there's a presidential election coming in the United States, and the leading republican contender doesn't have so much of an interest in these kinds of policies.

24:39
Speaker 4
I never understood wind. I know windmills very much. I've studied it better than anybody I know it's very expensive. They're made in China and Germany mostly. Very few made here. Almost none. But they're manufactured. Tremendous, if you're into this, tremendous fumes, gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know, we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe.

25:05
Speaker 2
I think that the election in the US is definitely a risk to this. You know, if Donald Trump gets elected president and acts in any way like he did in his first term, pulling out of the Paris agreement, stripping away pollution regulation, trying to roll back tax credits for clean energy, that sort of thing, I mean, that certainly is not going to help the US get to these goals. I would add, though, that compared even to Trump's last term in office, that the economic conditions of this energy transition are very different. The cost of renewables is much lower. And I think at this point, there's just enough momentum behind this that any company sees the direction that the global economy is going. And there's no rolling back from here.

25:58
Speaker 4
We're seeing evs more every day. Good to know. There's one that can still make people say, you don't see that every day because it's the only ev that's an f 150.

26:13
Speaker 2
So to that extent, that makes me feel like the US election, for example, is less important in this process, because this stuff is going to move ahead either way.

26:22
Speaker 1
So perhaps even more counterintuitively, you're saying if you don't have faith in governments, have faith in capitalism.

26:30
Speaker 2
Yeah. I mean, I think that companies that are in this energy transition space see the direction of travel and don't want to be left behind and want to figure out a way to survive there. And I think one thing you're going to potentially see as a result of that, which may be also challenging for the climate politics, is that there could be some more kind of energy price volatility in the near term. I mean, there's going to be some bumps along the road in all of this still going forward.

26:57
Speaker 1
I think it's easy to read about all of these cop summits and sort of despair because it never seems like enough is happening. It never feels like everyone's fully on board. But here we have cop 28 and you've got a historic agreement, you've got everyone. Unanimous decision to regulate fossil fuels, to do it by a deadline to make it equitable. It sounds good. But then you're telling us people still want gas, people still want oil. There's economic factors, it's sensitive to industry, it's sensitive to politics. You were there. I mean, should people despair or should people feel hopeful?

27:34
Speaker 2
Well, I've been covering climate change for almost 15 years, so this question looms large over my life as a climate journalist. I think that people should feel hopeful, honestly. That is not to say that there are not challenges ahead or that there are not climate impacts ahead, because there definitely are. And we have not seen the worst of this. It's going to get worse from here. That is unavoidable. So that is scary and that's the world that we live in. But I do think that there is momentum building around the transition and the solutions that are needed. We have it within our ability as a kind of global society or global economy to take actions that really have a dramatic impact on what the future is going to look like. And we can do those things and we're doing some of them now.

28:28
Speaker 2
So I do take hope from that.

28:33
Speaker 1
Tim McDonald, hopeful. He's awaiting your angry emails and tweets at semaphore. This is today explained from Vox. Our show was produced by Isabel angel and Victoria Chamberlain. We were edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact checked by Laura Bullard, and mixed by David Herman. We'll have more for you tomorrow.