Fossil Fuels at COP30: Sacred, Profane and Unmentioned
Photo by Ben Wicks
If the camel is a committee’s version of a horse, then the concluding notes of the 30th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP30) at Belém, Brazil were bound to be ungainly, weak, and messy. That is what you get from an emitting gathering of over 56,000 mostly subsidised attendees keen to etch their way into posterity. Leave aside the fact that some of the conference mongers might have been well meaning, the final agreement was always going to be significant for what it omitted. It was also prominent for lacking any official role from the United States, a country where Make America Great Again has all but parted ways with notions of climate change.
For three decades, these events have drawn attention to climate change ostensibly to address it. For three decades, the stuttering, the vacillation, the manipulation, have become habitual features, making the very object of condemnation – fossil fuels – both sacred and profane. The message is that humanity must do without it lest we let planet Earth cook; the message, equally, is that it can’t. “COP30 will be the ‘COP of truth,’” Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva declared extravagantly at the 80th United Nations General Assembly in September, immediately dooming it to comic platitude. The sacred and profane – fossil fuels – would remain strong at the end of the show.
There was some initial promise that attending member states might do something different. Initial pressure was exerted by the Colombia-led coalition (“mutirão” or joint effort) of 83 countries to abandon the use of fossil fuels and chart a Roadmap to decarbonise the global economy.
Then came a soggy threat by a group of 29 countries in a letter to the Brazilian COP presidency that any agreement lacking a commitment to phase out fossil fuels would be blocked. “We cannot support an outcome that does not include a roadmap for implementing a just, orderly, and equitable transition away from fossil fuels,” emphasised the authors, which included such countries as Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Palau, the UK and Vanuatu. This expectation is shared by a vast majority of Parties, as well as by science and by the people who are watching our work closely.” The threat duly sagged into oblivion.
The resulting COP 30 agreement, with the aspirational title “Global Mutirão: Uniting humanity in a global mobilization against climate change” was a tepid affair. There were the usual tired acknowledgments – the importance of addressing climate change (yes, that’s what they were there for); the need to conserve, protect and restore nature and ecosystems through reversing deforestation (wonderful); the human rights dimension (rights to health, a clean, healthy and sustainable environment); the importance of equity and the principle of common albeit differentiated responsibilities specific to the States (fine sentiments) known as the just transition mechanism.
Most conspicuously, the final agreement makes no mention of fossil fuels (it made a unique appearance in COP28), tantamount to discussing a raging pandemic without ever mentioning the devastating virus. As Jasper Inventor, Deputy Programme Director of Greenpeace International acidly remarked: “COP30 didn’t deliver ambition on the 3Fs – fossil fuels, finance and forests.” In what can only be regarded as an observation born from defeat and desperation, UN Climate Change Secretary Simon Stiell offered his summary: “Many countries wanted to move faster on fossil fuels, finance, and responding to climate disasters. I understand that frustration, and many of those I share myself. But let’s not ignore how far this COP has moved forward.” In this area of diplomacy, movement is excruciatingly relative.
There remained a modish insistence on voluntariness, with COP30 President André Corrêa de Lago announcing a voluntary “roadmap” to move away from fossil fuels. Officially, the sacred and the profane could not be mentioned; unofficially, other countries and civil society could do what they damn well wished to when addressing climate change challenges. To that end, the process would take place outside the formal UN processes and merge with the Columbia-steered “coalition of the willing”. The parties would otherwise, as the agreement stipulated, “launch the Global Implementation Accelerator” to “keep 1.5°C within reach”, yet another woolly term conceived by committee.
Colombia and the Netherlands were quick to announce their co-hosting of the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels. “This will be,” explained Irene Vélez Torres, Colombia’s Minister for Environment and Sustainable Development, “a broad intergovernmental, multisectoral platform complementary to the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] designed to identify legal, economic, and social pathways that are necessary to make the phasing out of fossil fuels.”
Admirable as this may be, a note of profound resignation reigned among many in the scientific community. While COP30 might have been seen as a meeting of “truth and implementation”, the truth, charged Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, was that keeping the target of 1.5°C within reach entailed bending “the global curve of emissions downward in 2026 and then reduce emissions by at least 5% per year.” And that’s saying nothing about implementation.
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