Extract from ABC News
For a few brief moments late in the piece at COP28, it seemed the improbable would happen.
There was chatter that a landmark deal to phase out fossil fuels to stop the world from boiling itself might just happen.
COP28 – the UN's annual climate jamboree – was after all being hosted by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a nation that is almost the embodiment of the petro-state.
Oil accounts for about half of Emirati economy
Across the border in Saudi Arabia – the world's biggest oil exporter in 2023 – the fossil fuel is responsible for almost two-thirds of government revenue.
Sultan Al Jaber, the COP28 president who is also the boss of the UAE's oil champion ADNOC, (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company) was pushing for a deal that landed the "most ambitious language" on fossil fuels.
So if the UAE couldn't get the other petro-states over the line, who could?
In the end, the final deal was passed with "historic" references to "transition away from fossil fuels", a pledge to triple renewable energy and a commitment to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by mid-century.
While many hailed it as a huge step forward, it was also met with objections including from small island nations like Samoa who told the conference "It seems that you just gavelled the decisions when the small island states weren't in the room."
The likes of Saudi Arabia and Russia, whose economies rise and fall on the strength of export prices for fossil fuels, chose not to kneecap themselves.
Such is the nature of realpolitik.
The episode serves to highlight a couple of underlying truths in the global warming debate.
One is that countries will almost invariably act in their own interests, no matter the pressure from peers on the world stage.
Take Saudi Arabia, for example.
Acclaimed energy writer Daniel Yergin has chronicled how the oil reserves of the Middle East, once fully understood by the US and its Western allies in the middle of the 20th century, were described as the "biggest prize in all history".
The amount of oil sitting under the sands of the Middle East is mind-blowing and the jewel in the crown is without doubt Saudi Arabia.
Reportedly, the cost of getting that oil out of the ground in Saudi Arabia is as little as $US5 a barrel.
By contrast, that barrel of oil can be sold on the world market today for about $US70 a barrel.
Often, it can be much, much more than that.
Windfalls from oil sales have made UAE and Saudi Arabia rich
Barely half a century ago, the economies of both countries were relatively non-existent, consisting almost entirely of subsistence agriculture and camel, sheep and goat herding.
Today they are some of the wealthiest countries per capita in the region.
Gleaming cities with highways half a mile wide – and cars almost as big to match – spring out of the desert landscape.
Saudis and Emiratis often live in palatial homes and when they do venture out, can spend their time in equally grand shopping malls and office towers.
Between their cars, their homes and their places of work and leisure, they hardly ever have to leave air-conditioned comfort.
None of this is to suggest that the sale of their oil isn't causing carbon emissions to rise and in turn, global temperatures to warm.
But all of it has been made possible by a natural endowment the global economy has wanted — and continues to demand.
They have the most to lose from the end of the fossil fuel age.
As such, it is highly unlikely they will willingly give up that natural advantage.
What's more, the United Nations process that governs the COP climate talks works in their favour.
Under that process, members of the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change all have to agree to any deal put forward at the conference.
Getting an agreement from every member — and there are almost 200 of them — is an extremely high bar to jump over.
Consequently, the terms of any agreement tend to settle on the lowest common denominator that is acceptable to all.
It is, by design, a process that lends itself to incremental, rather than big-bang, change.
Given that context, hopes by many countries, including most of Australia's Pacific Island neighbours, for a dramatic deal to phase out fossil fuels face perpetual frustration.
Perhaps for this reason, there was another view that was taking ever clearer shape on the ground in Dubai this past fortnight.
And it pretty much boiled down to this: rather than wait for governments to agree to phase out fossil fuels, renewable energy needed to make them redundant.
"I think that's very largely true that … certainly on a global scale," said Ed Crooks, vice-chair of the global energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie.
"It is important, essentially, for the new low-carbon alternatives to be cheaper and better than the high-carbon existing technologies.
"And that is generally how industrial transformations happen," he said.
"When you think about landline phones going to mobile.
"When you think about cars replacing horse-drawn carts, something comes along that is just better.
"And people adopt that. And that is the way that industrial change happens.
"That is certainly the case in energy as much as anything else."
To that end, Mr Crooks noted wind and solar power, in particular, were increasingly making headway.
From a negligible base recently, according to the International Energy Agency, renewable energy in 2022 accounted for 5.5 per cent of global electricity supply.
More tellingly, though, both Mr Crooks and respected Norwegian energy modeller Rystad point out that a tidal wave of renewable energy is coming thanks to a massive expansion in manufacturing capacity.
Tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030
An agreement in Dubai to triple renewable energy capacity across the world by 2030 and double energy efficiency was only likely to add to the momentum, Mr Cooks and Rystad said.
"What's really interesting is the number of areas where the low-carbon technology is now better than the high-carbon technology," Mr Crooks said.
"If you look across Asia, increasingly, renewables — wind and solar — are the lowest-cost option for power generation.
"If you want cheap electricity, the world's cheapest electricity, you're more often going to get it from building a solar plant or wind farm, than you are from building a new coal-fired power plant.
"If you look for info on what's been happening in China, absolutely staggering numbers. What's happening to solar power in China, this is breathtaking."
For sure, the switch to green energy will cost trillions of dollars globally over the coming decades and impose costs on households, businesses and taxpayers.
But, then again, so will business-as-usual, and that's to say nothing about the environmental costs of burning fossil fuels to power our electricity grids, fuel our cars and run our industries.
At COP28, perhaps sensing the stakes on the line, the oil and gas industry turned up in greater force than before to lobby its positions.
Key among those was the current essential nature of fossil fuels to the worldwide economy, which gets 80 per cent of its energy from coal, oil and gas even today.
Darren Woods, the chief of ExxonMobil, the biggest of the Western super majors, said there had been too much focus to date on using renewable energy to decarbonise the world's energy system and not enough attention on cleaning up the fossil fuels themselves.
Instead, Mr Woods told the Financial Times on the sides of COP28 that more money, time and effort should be poured into carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and biofuels.
"The transition is not limited to just wind, solar and EVs," Mr Woods was quoted as saying.
Certainly, Mr Crooks from Wood Mackenzie said capturing the emissions from oil and gas and storing them underground was better than releasing them into the atmosphere.
But he acknowledged the technology had its doubters as well as its problems, as exemplified by the troubles at the world's biggest CCS project at the Gorgon natural gas project off Western Australia.
"It is certainly true that the industry has to prove that that can achieve the levels of carbon capture that it's promising," Mr Crooks said.
Marc Allen, who owns and runs Australian advisory Unravel Carbon, said CCS held the promise of a "get-out-of-jail" card for the oil and gas industry.
However, he said there was little evidence so far anywhere in the world to suggest it could work at a scale that would eradicate, let alone dent, annual greenhouse gas emissions.
"Unabated is a pretty new term — it's only been brought up in the last year," Mr Allen said.
"I guess in some circles it's almost considered like a get-out-jail card.
"It's like saying that 'I can still do my thing, I can still get coal out of the ground, I can still get oil and gas out of the ground if I tack unabated on to it'.
"But if you look at what's actually happened with CCS, where we're at compared with where we said we were going to be or where we should be … there's miles between those two points.
"So there are some really heroic assumptions about how much we can scale that up."
Amid such a backdrop and the failure of COP28 to reach an agreement for the aggressive phase-out of fossil fuels, many will view the conference as a failure.
But for Richie Merzian, the international director of the Clean Energy Council and a former Australian government climate negotiator, such views would be unfair.
Mr Merzian said the COP process might be unruly, messy and far from perfect, but it was also the best process the world had.
What's more, he noted that before the historic Paris Agreement in 2015 — in which the world agreed to try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — temperatures were on track to increase 4 degrees.
Depending on the source, he said temperatures were now projected to increase to a lesser extent, perhaps as little as 2 degrees.
"Before Paris, it looked like everything was off the rails.
"Now, eight years later, we have a target … that looks like it's within earshot.
"It looks incremental, it looks messy, it is frustrating, it still leaves a gap.
"But it is the best process we have and incremental progress is definitely better than going backwards."
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