COP 28 - 100 Hours of Climate News Set the Agenda for 2024

[Oscar]

COP 28 - 100 Hours of Climate News Set the Agenda for 2024

[ https://energymixweekender.substack.com ... dium=email ]

The COP28 climate summit delivered the best result it could. It was progress. It wasn’t nearly enough. Now—again, still—it’s up to the rest of us.

MITCHELL BEER DECEMBER 17, 2023 The Energy Mix Weekender ***NOTE: Numerous Internal Links***

EXCERPT: "The COP28 climate summit showed the transformative power and the overwhelming limits of what 195 countries can get done at a United Nations climate summit. The 100 hours of news reports since have laid out an urgent to-do list for the next year.

As UN Climate Secretary Simon Stiell predicted, we’ve seen “reams of analysis of all the initiatives announced here in Dubai”—from the historic, Day One agreement to finally get a global loss and damage fund off the ground, to the pledge to triple renewable energy capacity and double the pace of energy efficiency improvements by 2030.

But the lion’s share of the commentary has gone to passages in the 21-page decision text that talked about “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems” and “reducing both consumption and production of fossil fuels in a just, orderly and equitable manner so as to achieve net zero by, or before, or around 2050 in keeping with the science”.

Those 40 words were a weak victory in the constellation of United Nations legal jargon, and yet a huge achievement nearly 30 years in the making, the first time a consensus document from a UN conference flagged fossil fuels as the root of the global climate emergency.

The text falls far short of the language of fossil fuel phaseout or phasedown that echoed through the sprawling conference facility in Dubai for nearly two weeks.

It includes shout-outs to expensive, deeply questionable technologies like carbon capture and storage, carbon dioxide removal, and small modular nuclear reactors that won’t help countries achieve a looming 2030 emissions reduction target. Whose main function is to give political cover to continued expansion of oil and gas production. . . ?

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