With wildfires more than doubling last year, over 600 excess deaths in B.C. in 2021 from heat, fire and flooding, and hundreds of millions in climate change damage, international efforts must be directed at the problem. Why then have international climate negotiations not led to an explicit acknowledgement that a phase-out of fossil fuels is essential to reach the Paris 1.5 C target? The UN climate science panel, the IPCC, has stated for almost a decade that achieving the 1.5 C target requires natural gas, oil and coal production to decrease by 45%, 60% and 100% respectively by 2050, including scenarios with heavy use of carbon capture and storage.
The answer is that tapering production, or even its discussion, is opposed by path-dependent countries, industries and banks which together have benefited from fossil fuels and are committed to maintaining the status quo. Their objective is to use misleading narratives and the structural weakness in international climate agreements, to prevent or slow transition.
The first line of attack is to use international climate meetings, at which all decisions are made by consensus and every country is allowed to modify the wording of policy releases, to slow climate progress. This has allowed producers and heavy consumers of fossil fuels to weaken or veto proposals favoured by the majority of countries.
The second is that while the UN IPCC provides a summary of scientific data it is prevented from discussing the data’s implications and application. Decision making therefore falls to COP signatories who are typically non-scientists and are focused on their national political and economic self-interest. We see this behaviour in the U.S., Russia and Canada voting as a block against proposals to decrease production despite their many political differences.
Producing countries and their supporters push continuing production, block any attempts to introduce a timeline for fossil fuel phase-out and frequently use quasi-science in their discussions. The latter frequently includes statements that technology, specifically carbon capture and storage and hydrogen, allows meeting the Paris 1.5 C target while increasing production, something that has been shown repeatedly to be false.
Perhaps the best spokesperson for this group is Dr. Al Jaber, the president of UEA’s COP who stated there was no scientific evidence that production must decrease to achieve the 1.5 C target and insinuated that anyone who does not agree with him is unhelpful, trying to undermine his presidency and willing to take society back to living in caves. Although he reiterated his commitment to science after the head of the IPCC informed him of the data described above he did not explain why he was unaware of the data and did not explicitly endorse its validity.
Dr. Al Jaber’s unintended highlighting of the scientific basis justifying decreasing fossil fuel production may provide the push needed to approve a phase-out statement this year. However this is unlikely as Saudi Arabia has stated it will not accept this language and, given the need for consensus at COP, it may be decades before the words phase-out are seen in international climate policy.
Aidan Byrne
Victoria
