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With a deal on the global stocktake yet to emerge from Dubai, we asked an expert to fill us in.
This year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP28, has been broadly defined by two facts. The first is that the conference is headed by the CEO of the United Arab Emirates’ state-owned oil company. The second is that this is the year of the first global stocktake, a document that should, in theory, set the world on a path to achieve the goals laid out in the Paris Agreement of 2015.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, that combination has not produced tremendous results. The latest draft of the stocktake dropped language calling for a fossil fuel phase-out. The condemnation was swift: “We will not sign our death certificate,” said the Association of Small Island States in a statement. “We think there are elements in the text that are fully unacceptable,” Spain’s environment minister said.
I was curious: How, exactly, does a global stocktake come to be? To find out, I called up Tom Evans, a policy advisor and climate negotiations specialist at the climate change think tank E3G, who is currently on the ground in Dubai. Our conversation, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.
Catch me up. How are things going on the ground?
It’s … going along. There’s a lot of discussions at the moment around the text that came out yesterday. Many, many parties are dissatisfied with the level of ambition in that text. It didn’t have the fossil fuel phaseout, it wasn’t strong enough on things like finance or adaptation, so that has triggered this big backlash. It’s all happening behind closed doors at the moment with ministers and politicians talking about the text, and the rest of us are kind of in a black box with regards to what’s going on. But it’s all really on a knife’s edge.
What is happening behind those doors, as best as you can tell?
The process is somewhat unclear. COPs don’t have any strict procedures; the presidency can choose how to do this diplomacy to get to the outcome it needs. At the moment, we’re in the phase of basically bilateral consultations being led by the UAE. The presidency is bringing people together behind the scenes. Everyone’s kind of slowly talking to each other.
What do you mean by bilateral consultations, exactly?
The UAE sitting down with a party — let’s say India, for example — and hearing their concerns and understanding what their red lines are, what they’re looking to change in the text. And then with that knowledge they’ll have another meeting, sitting down with, say, the U.S., having the same conversation and trying to map out where people sit based on these conversations.
They don’t have a big meeting room where everyone is at the table. They haven’t done a plenary yet. Last night they did a heads of delegation meeting, which brought all parties together. It was a closed meeting, and it started at 10 p.m. and finished at about 2 a.m. last night, which we hadn’t seen before.
Of course, at the same time, countries are talking to each other in different configurations. So there are different groups who will come together, such as the regional groups [who might have common goals]. And the U.S., I’m sure, is talking to China and Saudi Arabia.
The UAE has other tools at their disposal — earlier this week they hosted an informal ministerial circle where they talked about the issues together — but at the moment, they’re choosing to do this very closed or bilateral diplomacy, probably because the stakes are high and they need to act sensitively around what this next iteration of text looks like. Because an awful lot hinges upon it.
There must be some real power dynamics at play here. Are there some countries that the UAE is more inclined to listen to than others?
The UNFCCC is weird because some of the times those power dynamics are different from what you might expect. Small island states and other countries have an awful lot of power compared to [the regular UN framework], where they’re not the geopolitical shapers. But in this space, they have much more power because of their moral authority.
This word, “stocktake,” implies a kind of mathematical act. Is there an emissions reckoning happening?
Stocktake is definitely a bad name — we’ve already done a lot of the stock-taking. The past two years had the process of technical dialogues among parties and experts and non-party stakeholders, and we had reports including the IPCC which fed into that. Those conclusions were published back in September, and that report kind of tells us what we already know: Action is growing but inadequate, finance is not there at the scale needed, it’s not going to the right people in the right places at the right time. We think we know what we need to do, we just have to find the ways to do it. How do we commit [to] things here in Dubai that will bend the emissions curve and make sure that actions are implemented on the ground?
Before this COP, I had the impression that the stocktake is going to be some sort of big reckoning of past and future emissions. But it sounds like what’s happening now is similar to how past COP negotiations have gone. Is there something that makes the stocktake stand out from the agreements that were negotiated at previous COPs?
One big difference is that this is the central mechanism of the Paris Agreement, where we take stock and assess how to close gaps to meeting those goals. And that hasn’t happened in a formal way before.
The Paris Agreement was designed to have a stocktake so that we could make sure that our successive action, as the years go by, was ratcheting up, making sure that we’re not just coasting along but really delivering stronger and stronger progress. So that’s an important part of this. We are engaging with the Paris Agreement and saying, “okay, can we make sure it fulfills its goals in that formal way?”
The other part of it is that the stocktake, because it’s had this two-year process, has clearly identified the gaps. No one can deny that we’re not doing enough on finance and that adaptation is massively neglected. We’ve acknowledged that there’s been some progress on emission reductions, but it’s just an incremental push towards what's needed. Those conclusions have a certain weight that we can draw from.
What happens if there is no agreement? Is that an option?
I don’t think that is an option. No agreement would be a failure, a clear sign of an inability of the parties to rise to the challenge of what’s needed. There’s obviously a difficult question about what level of agreement is not good enough, but that’s the reason why the parties are working so hard right now to rescue this — because the deal on the table at the moment was clearly falling below that line. That’s why we saw the backlash.
The UAE certainly will be aware that that is what’s at stake. It’s their presidency, they need to deliver what they set out to do. They need to be able to show the final success. After a year of many pledges and announcements, new money, new initiatives — all of that is important, but it doesn’t count unless you negotiate this final outcome.
And every party has to agree to the final outcome?
It has to be consensus, though what exactly consensus means can be debated. Everyone would have to not object. The weird state of the UNFCCC process means that sometimes there have been things which aren’t necessarily fully agreed 100% but still reached consensus.
Consensus isn’t perfect. It’s a political call, it's not a mathematical number game where you tally up votes. For example, even this year, when the parties agreed [to] the loss and damage fund, the U.S. said in that meeting that they didn’t agree to it. But they said they weren’t in the room when consensus was reached, because the negotiator had left the room temporarily, so an agreement was reached and they approved it here in Dubai.
So there’s ways you can play with the system and survive. There have been instances in the past I’ve heard many years ago where decisions have been gaveled through despite objection because the presidency felt confident that the objections were not sufficient to obstruct the outcome.
This is the first stocktake process. Do you think part of what’s making it so hard is that there is no previous framework?
To an extent we’re creating something new, trying to do this for the first time. But I think also, it’s the politics. We are looking at the hardest issue, and for the first time in years getting on the edge of agreeing [to] something like a fossil fuel phaseout. And that brings up deep challenges for countries who are extremely dependent on fossil fuels. That’s true on all sides — not just producers, but also consumers.
We’re talking about initiating a model for the world which doesn’t have fossils in it. And that’s never been done — even in countries who have decarbonized to a great degree, they have not been able to show how that works at an international level.
So it is a huge ask, and there is no doubt that there can be challenges when trying to do that. And that’s what we’re seeing. We’re seeing the pains of trying to get something that’s useful. We’re no longer negotiating a treaty like we were in Paris. We’re no longer agreeing on a rulebook, which we did for five years up until COP26. We’re now really firmly talking about implementation. What does it mean to deliver the Paris Agreement? What does it mean to actually reduce emissions, not just pledge targets? So obviously it’s going to be a painful conversation, but it’s a difficult and important one.
Is there a misconception or something frustrating about this process that you wish people knew more about?
I think the biggest frustration is that this isn’t about just a technical exercise where you’re like, “oh, we need to phase out fossil fuels, because that's what is needed.” I mean, that’s true. But there’s a deeper question here of “how does the Paris Agreement work?”
The Paris Agreement works on the basis of a deal that if we have finance, if we have cooperation, if we have means to deliver action, [then] we can do more ambitious things, we can raise and accelerate action. That is what is at stake here. So when we’re talking about phasing out fossil fuels, we should also be asking, where’s the financial pathway to do that? When we’re talking about trying to make sure that countries have more adaptation, where is the money on the table to do that? And at the moment, we know it’s a drop in the ocean. These are the contours of the deal that we need to really examine.
And it won’t be all sealed here. It goes on and on until COP30 and after that. But the global stocktake is, I think, like a marriage vow renewal. You need to kind of renew the trust and the faith that that deal, that system’s working. And right now it’s looking like maybe a shaky marriage.
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On the looming climate summit, clean energy stocks, and Hurricane Rafael
Current conditions: A winter storm could bring up to 4 feet of snow to parts of Colorado and New Mexico • At least 89 people are still missing from extreme flooding in Spain • The Mountain Fire in Southern California has consumed 14,000 acres and is zero percent contained.
The world is still reeling from the results of this week’s U.S. presidential election, and everyone is trying to get some idea of what a second Trump term means for policy – both at home and abroad. Perhaps most immediately, Trump’s election is “set to cast a pall over the UN COP29 summit next week,” said the Financial Times. Already many world leaders and business executives have said they will not attend the climate talks in Azerbaijan, where countries will aim to set a new goal for climate finance. “The U.S., as the world’s richest country and key shareholder in international financial institutions, is viewed as crucial to that goal,” the FT added.
Trump has called climate change a hoax, vowed to once again remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, and promised to stop U.S. climate finance contributions. He has also promised to “drill, baby, drill.” Yesterday President Biden put new environmental limitations on an oil-and-gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The lease sale was originally required by law in 2017 by Trump himself, and Biden is trying to “narrow” the lease sale without breaking that law, according to The Washington Post. “The election results have made the threat to America's Arctic clear,” Kristen Miller, executive director of Alaska Wilderness League, toldReuters. “The fight to save the Arctic Refuge is back, and we are ready for the next four years.”
Another early effect of the decisive election result is that clean energy stocks are down. The iShares Global Clean Energy exchange traded fund, whose biggest holdings are the solar panel company First Solar and the Spanish utility and renewables developer Iberdola, is down about 6%. The iShares U.S. Energy ETF, meanwhile, whose largest holdings are Exxon and Chevron, is up over 3%. Some specific publicly traded clean energy stocks have sunk, especially residential solar companies like Sunrun, which is down about 30% compared to Tuesday. “That renewables companies are falling more than fossil energy companies are rising, however, indicates that the market is not expecting a Trump White House to do much to improve oil and gas profitability or production, which has actually increased in the Biden years thanks to the spikes in energy prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and continued exploitation of America’s oil and gas resources through hydraulic fracturing,” wrote Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin.
Hurricane Rafael swept through Cuba yesterday as a Category 3 storm, knocking out the power grid and leaving 10 million people without electricity. Widespread flooding is reported. The island was still recovering from last month’s Hurricane Oscar, which left at least six people dead. The electrical grid – run by oil-fired power plants – has collapsed several times over the last few weeks. Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said yesterday that about 17% of crude oil production and 7% of natural gas output in the Gulf of Mexico was shut down because of Rafael.
It is “virtually certain” that 2024 will be the warmest year on record, according to the European Copernicus Climate Change Service. In October, the global average surface air temperature was about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than pre-industrial averages for that month. This year is also on track to be the first entire calendar year in which temperatures are more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. “This marks a new milestone in global temperature records and should serve as a catalyst to raise ambition for the upcoming climate change conference,” said Copernicus deputy director Dr. Samantha Burgess.
C3S
The world is falling short of its goal to double the rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030, the International Energy Agency said in its new Energy Efficiency 2024 report. Global primary energy intensity – which the IEA explained is a measure of efficiency – will improve by 1% this year, the same as last year. It needs to be increasing by 4% by the end of the decade to meet a goal set at last year’s COP. “Boosting energy efficiency is about getting more from everyday technologies and industrial processes for the same amount of energy input, and means more jobs, healthier cities and a range of other benefits,” the IEA said. “Improving the efficiency of buildings and vehicles, as well as in other areas, is central to clean energy transitions, since it simultaneously improves energy security, lowers energy bills for consumers and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.” The group called for more government action as well as investment in energy efficient technologies.
Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon fell by 30.6% in the 12 months leading up to July, compared to a year earlier. It is now at the lowest levels since 2015.
State-level policies and “unstoppable” momentum for clean energy.
As the realities of Trump’s return to office and the likelihood of a Republican trifecta in Washington began to set in on Wednesday morning, climate and clean energy advocates mostly did not sugarcoat the result or look for a silver lining. But in press releases and interviews, reactions to the news coalesced around two key ways to think about what happens next.
Like last time Trump was elected, the onus will now fall on state and local leaders to make progress on climate change in spite of — and likely in direct conflict with — shifting federal priorities. Working to their advantage, though, much more so than last time, is global political and economic momentum behind the growth of clean energy.
“No matter what Trump may say, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable,” former White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy said in a statement.
“This is a dark day, but despite this election result, momentum is on our side,” Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous wrote. “The transition away from dirty fossil fuels to affordable clean energy is already underway.”
“States are the critical last line of defense on climate,” said Caroline Spears, the executive director of Climate Cabinet, a group that campaigns for local climate leaders, during a press call on Wednesday. “I used to work in the solar industry under the Trump administration. We still built solar and it was on the back of great state policy.”
Reached by phone on Wednesday, the climate policy strategist Sam Ricketts offered a blunt assessment of where things stand. “First things first, this outcome sucks,” he said. He worried aloud about what another four years of Trump would mean for his kids and the planet they inherit. But Ricketts has also been here before. During Trump’s first term, he worked for the “climate governor,” Washington’s Jay Inslee, and helped further state and local climate policy around the country for the Democratic Governors Association. “For me, it is a familiar song,” he said.
Ricketts believes the transition to clean energy has become inevitable. But he offered other reasons states may be in a better position to make progress over the next four years than they were last time. There are now 23 states with Democratic governors and at least 15 with Democratic trifectas — compare that to 2017, when there were just 16 Democratic governors and seven trifectas. Additionally, Democrats won key seats in the state houses of Wisconsin and North Carolina that will break up previous Republican supermajorities and give the Democratic governors in those states more opportunity to make progress.
Spears also highlighted these victories during the Climate Cabinet press call, adding that they help illustrate that the election was not a referendum on climate policy. “We have examples of candidates who ran forward on climate, they ran forward on clean energy, and they still won last night in some tough toss-up districts,” she said.
Ricketts also pointed to signs that climate policy itself is popular. In Washington, a ballot measure that would have repealed the state’s emissions cap-and-invest policy failed. “The vote returns aren’t all in, but that initiative has been obliterated at the ballot box by voters in Washington State who want to continue that state’s climate progress,” he said.
But the enduring popularity of climate policy in Democratic states is not a given. Though the measure to overturn Washington’s cap-and-invest law was defeated, another measure that would revoke the state’s nation-leading policies to regulate the use of natural gas in buildings hangs in the balance. If it passes, it will not only undo existing policies but also hamstring state and local policymakers from discouraging natural gas in the future. In Berkeley, California, the birthplace of the movement to ban gas in buildings, a last-ditch effort to preserve that policy through a tax on natural gas was rejected by voters.
Meanwhile, two counties in Oregon overwhelmingly voted in favor of a nonbinding ballot measure opposing offshore wind development. And while 2024 brought many examples of climate policy progress at the state level, there were also some signs of states pulling back due to concerns about cost, exemplified by New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s major reversal on congestion pricing in New York City.
The oft-repeated hypothesis that Republican governors and legislators might defend President Biden’s climate policies because of the investments flowing to red states is also about to be put to the test. “I think that's going to be a huge issue and question,” Barry Rabe, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, told me. “You know, not only can Democrats close ranks to oppose any changes, but is there any kind of cross-party Republican base of support?”
Josh Freed, the senior vice president for the climate and clean energy program at Third Way, warned that the climate community has a lot of work to do to build more public support for clean energy. He pointed to the rise of right-wing populism around the world, driven in part by the perception that the transition away from fossil fuels is hurting real people at the expense of corporate and political interests.
“We’ve seen, in many places, a backlash against adopting electric vehicles,” he told me. “We’ve seen, at the local county level, opposition to siting of renewables. People perceive a push for eliminating natural gas from cooking or from home heating as an infringement on their choice and as something that’s going to raise costs, and we have to take that seriously.”
One place Freed sees potential for continued progress is in corporate action. A lot of the momentum on clean energy is coming from the private sector, he said, naming companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google that have invested considerable funds in decarbonization. He doesn’t see that changing.
A counterpoint, raised by Rabe, is those companies’ contribution to increasing demand for electricity — which has simultaneously raised interest in financing clean energy projects and expanding natural gas plants.
As I was wrapping up my call with Ricketts, he acknowledged that state and local action was no substitute for federal leadership in tackling climate change. But he also emphasized that these are the levers we have right now. Before signing off, he paraphrased something the writer Rebecca Solnit posted on social media in the wee hours of the morning after the electoral college was called. It’s a motto that I imagine will become something of a rallying cry for the climate movement over the next four years. “We can’t save everything, but we can save some things, and those things are worth saving,” Ricketts said.
Rob and Jesse talk about what comes next in the shift to clean energy.
Last night, Donald Trump secured a second term in the White House. He campaigned on an aggressively pro-fossil -fuel agenda, promising to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s landmark 2022 climate law, and roll back Environmental Protection Agency rules governing power plant and car and truck pollution.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob pick through the results of the election and try to figure out where climate advocates go from here. What will Trump 2.0 mean for the federal government’s climate policy? Did climate policies notch any wins at the state level on Tuesday night? And where should decarbonization advocates focus their energy in the months and years to come? Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: You know the real question, I guess — and I just, I don’t have a ton of optimism here — is if there can be some kind of bipartisan support for the idea that changing the way we permit transmission lines is good for economic growth. It’s good for resilience. It’s good for meeting demand from data centers and factories and other things that we need going forward. Whether that case can be made in a different, entirely different political context is to be seen, but it certainly will not move forward in the same context as the [Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024] negotiations.
Robinson Meyer: And I think there’s a broad question here about what the Trump administration looks like in terms of its energy agenda. We know the environmental agenda will be highly deregulatory and interested in recarbonizing the economy, so to speak, or at least slowing down decarbonization — very oil- and gas-friendly.
I think on the energy agenda, we can expect oil and gas friendliness as well, obviously. But I do think, in terms of who will be appointed to lead or nominated to lead the Department of Energy, I think there’s a range of whether you would see a nominee who is aggressively focused on only doing things to support oil and gas, or a nominee who takes a more Catholic approach and is interested in all forms of energy development.
And I don’t, I don’t mean to be … I don’t think that’s obvious. I just think that’s like a … you kind of can see threads of that across the Republican Party. You can see some politicians who are interested only, really, in helping fossil fuels. You can see some politicians who are very excited, say, about geothermal, who are excited about shoring up the grid, right? Who are excited about carbon capture.
And I think the question of who winds up taking control of the energy portfolio in a future Trump administration means … One thing that was true of the first Trump administration that I don’t expect to go away this time is that the Trump policymaking process is extremely chaotic, right? He’s surrounded by different actors. There’s a lot of informal delegation. Things happen, and he’s kind of involved in it, but sometimes he’s not involved in it. He likes having this team of rivals who are constantly jockeying for position. In some ways it’s a very imperial-type system, and I think that will continue.
One topic I’ve been paying a lot of attention to, for instance, is nuclear. The first Trump administration said a lot of nice things about nuclear, and they passed some affirmatively supportive policy for the advanced nuclear industry, and they did some nice things for small modular reactors. I think if you look at this administration, it’s actually a little bit more of a mixed bag for nuclear.
RFK, who we know is going to be an important figure in the administration, at least at the beginning, is one of the biggest anti nuclear advocates there is. And his big, crowning achievement, one of his big crowning achievements was helping to shut down Indian Point, the large nuclear reactor in New York state. JD Vance, Vice President-elect JD Vance, has said that shutting down nuclear reactors is one of the dumbest things that we can do and seems to be quite pro, we should be producing more nuclear.
Jenkins: On the other hand, Tucker Carlson was on, uh …
Meyer: … suggested it was demonic, yeah.
Jenkins: Exactly, and no one understands how nuclear technology works or where it came from.
Meyer: And Donald Trump has kind of said both things. It’s just super uncertain and … it’s super uncertain.
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.