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Climate

The COP28 Deal Is Literally Meaningless — But Not Useless

The Dubai conference may have handed activists a powerful new tool.

John Kerry and Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

As North America slept, delegates from around the world concluded the global climate conference in Dubai, when the chair — local oilman Sultan al-Jaber — quick-gaveled through an agreement that included a sentence calling for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.”

That may not seem like much — it is, after all, the single most obvious thing one could possibly say about climate change, akin to “in an effort to reduce my headache, I am transitioning away from hitting myself in the forehead with a hammer.” And by itself it will accomplish nothing. As Samoa, speaking on behalf of the Small Island Nations, said a few minutes later, “we have come to the conclusion that the course correction that is needed has not been secured.”

But it is — and this is important — a tool for activists to use henceforth. The world’s nations have now publicly agreed that they need to transition off fossil fuels, and that sentence will hang over every discussion from now on — especially the discussions about any further expansion of the fossil fuel energy. There may be barriers to shutting down operations (what the text of the agreement obliquely refers to as “national circumstances, pathways and approaches”). But surely, if the language means anything at all, it means opening no more new oil fields, no more new pipeline. No more new LNG export terminals.

In fact, that last point — export terminals for liquefied natural gas — will almost certainly be the first real test of whether this agreement means anything. The American envoy John Kerry, who celebrated his 80th birthday during the talks, could be forgiven for thinking of it as a crowning achievement. Though he acknowledged stronger language would have been nice, “I think everybody here should be pleased that in a world of Ukraine and the Middle East war and all the other challenges of a planet that is foundering, this is a moment where multilateralism has actually come together and people have taken individual interests and attempted to define the common good,” Kerry said. “That is hard. That is the hardest thing in diplomacy, the hardest thing in politics.”

But Kerry’s job isn’t done. He needs to return home and convince the White House to pause the granting of new export licenses for the ongoing LNG buildout, a project so enormous that by itself it could produce more greenhouse gas emissions than all of Europe. If the White House agrees — and Dubai saw the release of a letter from 230 environmental organizations urging just such a pause — then we will know there was something real in all this endless talk.

And in that case, the bland sentence — “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner” would join at least two others in the long history of the climate talks as historically significant.

The first came in 1995, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its second assessment report, said “the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.” That bland sentence — bland for the same reason, because it also had to get past every government in the world — was the death knell for the argument that climate change wasn’t real; after it, no serious person (admittedly a category with many exceptions) could argue there was no need to do anything.

The second came in 2015, in the preamble to the Paris accords, when (at the urging of those same small island states) the text included a pledge to “substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to hold global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change.” That recognition of 1.5 degrees changed the debate — but only because activists and scientists used it to demand that governments and businesses identify a “1.5 degree path,” which increased the seriousness of those plans. We’re not going to stay below 1.5 degrees — but that sentence may, in the end, knock half a degree off how much the planet warms.

If today’s sentence is to matter, it will need that same kind of activism, especially since the fossil fuel industry — the most well-represented ‘nation’ at the talks — managed to lard the text with wiggle words. For instance, the agreement “recognizes that transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security,” which the fracked gas industry is going to interpret as permission for them to go on pumping. We need to insist that the clear, plain meaning of the language is, the fossil fuel era is over. No more new digging and drilling.

What I’m trying to say is, today’s agreement is literally meaningless — and potentially meaningful. But the diplomats are done now — the rest of us are going to have to supply that meaning.

Note: A version of this article originally appeared in the author’s newsletter, The Crucial Years, and has been repurposed for Heatmap.

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Bill McKibben profile image

Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. He’s gone on to write 20 books, and his work appears regularly in periodicals from the New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize as well as honorary degrees from 20 colleges and universities. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the alternative Nobel, in the Swedish Parliament. Foreign Policy named him to its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers. McKibben helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, which has organized protests on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action. He played a leading role in launching the opposition to big oil pipeline projects like Keystone XL, and the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has become the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history, with endowments worth more than $40 trillion stepping back from oil, gas and coal. He stepped down as board chair of 350 in 2015, and left the board and stepped down from his volunteer role as senior adviser in 2020, accepting emeritus status. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, where he spends as much time as possible outdoors. In 2014, biologists credited his career by naming a new species of woodland gnat — Megophthalmidia mckibbeni – in his honor.

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