In an ideal world, negotiators at the recent COP28 in Dubai would have agreed that all 197 nations that were on hand would tax greenhouse gas emissions. That was not on the table, of course. But the absence of such action does not mean that the gathering was a failure.
On the bright side, the final document called on countries to transition "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."
As Somini Sengupta noted in The New York Times, “It took 28 years of climate negotiations for world leaders to agree to wean the global economy from the principal source of climate change: the burning of fossil fuels.” Mohamed Adow, a climate campaigner from Kenya, said, “We’re finally naming the elephant in the room.”
And, as Andrew Freedman of Axios put it, the agreement “sent a signal to the markets and lawmakers to work harder and faster to expand renewables like wind and solar power and meet the new global goal of tripling such energy capacity by 2030.”
But many commentators and reporters, including Freedman, prescribed doses of reality in sizing up COP28. “Let’s be real,” urged Auden Schendler, senior vice president of sustainability at Aspen One. “The summit’s proposals for voluntary commitments — on methane, on renewables, on phasing out fossil fuels — were theater,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “Imagine if in the 1960s Americans had responded to the civil rights movement not with legislation but with calls to please treat one another nicely.”
Veteran climate journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, writing in The New Yorker, observed: “Certainly, everyone should hope that the outcome of the negotiations in Dubai represents, as (COP28 President Sultan Ahmed) Al Jaber put it, a ‘paradigm shift.’ But, after twenty-eight COPs, and twenty-eight years of rising emissions, skepticism is clearly justified. Perhaps by next year’s COP, the significance of the U.A.E. Consensus will be clear.”
TIME’s Aryn Baker concluded that the 21-page “Global Stocktake,” as it’s called, “is noteworthy for finally acknowledging that countries need to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels. Nonetheless, it is riddled with loopholes and lacks clear goals and fixed timelines. Boiled down into three words, it says, essentially, ‘We will try.’”
One encouraging sign was a greater focus on climate change’s toll on our health. “In the health community this was a movement-building COP,” said Elizabeth Willetts, the planetary health policy director at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We can feel pessimistic about limited progress on meaningful agreement to strengthen mitigation, but it is worth being optimistic that COP28 was a watershed moment for engaging the health sector as a stakeholder group in climate negotiations. After several years of organic organizing, hundreds of health professionals from around the world joined together in Dubai to track and advocate within the negotiation process.”
COP28 also made progress on curbing methane emissions, which have tended to be overlooked because of the concern about carbon dioxide. Under the Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter, 50 companies accounting for 40 percent of global oil production committed to eliminating their methane emissions by 2050. They also committed to ending flaring by 2030. But, as Umair Irfan pointed out in Vox, “Few of the announced actions, however, include the largest driver of methane pollution: the food we eat.”
The bottom line on COP28? “A key test for national governments,” wrote The Times’ Sengupta, “will come in 2025, when every country is expected to set its next round of climate targets, known as nationally determined contributions.” She then quoted former Vice President Al Gore: “Whether this is a turning point that truly marks the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era depends on the actions that come next.”