With the annual meeting of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) taking place in November, 2024, this is a good time to reflect on what happened .
.. and did not happen at the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP-28), held in Dubai, U.
A.E., one year ago.
If you read newspapers, checked your email, listened to the radio, or watched television, you probably learned that COP28 was either a great success, a distinct failure, or somewhere between the two, based to a considerable degree on a paragraph in the COP‘s closing statement (officially the “Decision of the First Global Stocktake,” and unofficially the “UAE Consensus”) about the future of fossil fuels, in particular, a statement endorsing “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner ...
” In this essay, I step back from the headlines, and offer my assessment of what happened at COP-28. COP-28, in my judgment, was successful, but not in the way success has been characterized in most articles I‘ve seen. In the end, the above endorsement of “transitioning away from fossil fuels” (instead of language proposed by greener interests of “phasing down” or even “phasing out” fossil fuels) combined with the endorsement of “accelerating zero- and low-emission technologies, including .
.. renewables, nuclear, abatement and removal technologies such as carbon capture and utilization and storage .
..” was sufficient to win the approval of the .
