Reuters World News - COP 28: What's at stake in global climate talks

Episode Date: December 2, 2023

As the world begins to feel the effects of climate change, government leaders, environmental activists and private interests are converging in Dubai for the COP28 climate summit. In this special podcast episode, we look at what's at stake as the world gets hotter, do nations have the political will to do what is neccessary, and some of the solutions being discussed. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This year was the hottest on record, and one in which Earth experienced record heat waves, wildfires and storms. And as the world begins to feel the effects of climate change, government leaders, environmental activists, and private interests, are converging in Dubai for the COP28 climate summit. In this special edition of the Reuters World News podcast, we look at what's at stake as the world gets hotter. Do nations have the political will to do what's necessary? What are some of the solutions being discussed? And what are the sticking points? I'm Kim Vinal in London. I'm Valerie Volkvici in Washington, D.C.

I'm Gloria Dickey in London. And I'm Katie Daigle, also in Washington, D.C. Hi, Katie. Hi, Valerie. Hi, Kim. Thank you guys so much for joining me. Thank you for having us. Katie, for the uninitiated, what is cop? So COP stands for the conference of parties, that being the parties, the countries that signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

That was the first treaty. One of the few global treaties ever to be approved by all the world's nations. In that treaty, the world's countries agreed to take action to halt or limit climate change. That was agreed in 1992. And the first conference of parties or COP was staged in Berlin in 1995. We're now heading into the 28th annual conference, or COP28. It's being held in Dubai. And this is where at these conferences,

countries discuss how best to tackle climate change and the many related issues that stem from it. It's an important gathering for world leaders to show that they and their countries are still engaged in the effort and upholding the original UNFCCC agreement. Valerie, you've been to Walt. like seven cops. Can you just set the scene for us? What is it actually like on the ground at these things? Sure, yes. It's more cops than I care to admit I've been to. But yes, basically,

you enter these cities. The whole city gets completely taken over. There are tens of thousands of people who register to go. I think this year, they're saying something in excess of 70,000. And this is people including government delegations, NGOs. In this case, this year, quite a few private sector companies, including a lot of energy sector companies. It's a two-week event. And it's basically a mad scramble. You've got the negotiations that take place. In one part of the venue, you've got almost like a trade show where you see a number of different companies, anything from energy companies to different climate solution companies.

and in the middle of all that you have loads of journalists running around trying to figure out what's happening. And NGOs. Usually there's a pretty robust gathering of activists. This year that might be more muted, but there's always a very colorful presence of people from civil society, young people, indigenous groups. So it's a really interesting gathering that happens every year. Katie, what are some of the big issues COP28 will be attempting to tackle? So this year, there's a lot of focus on the role of fossil fuels in the future. Burning of fossil fuels is the main reason we are in the climate crisis. And so there are a lot of countries, especially vulnerable countries that are wanting to see the global community commit to quitting fossil fuels or phasing down the use of them. There are also a lot of countries whose economies rely on fossil fuels, exporting them, producing them. They are hoping to, or some of them are hoping to, or some of them are hoping to,

hoping to preserve a role for fossil fuels into the future. And so they're hoping to focus conversations around technologies that might abate the emissions or might capture the emissions that come from the burning of fossil fuels. One man hoping to bridge the gap between fossil fuels and fighting climate change is this year's host. Sultan al-Jabbar is a UAE oil chief with a formidable reputation for results.

Can the world come together to meet the urgency of this moment, can the world cut emissions in half in next seven years? And my answer is yes. You're probably wondering how exactly does an oil executive end up as head of the COP climate talks. Mahal Dahan is in Dubai and can explain. Yeah, it was a controversial decision for many of his critics, and you can immediately understand why. He didn't. He It does have the background in renewables that a lot of the people who support his presidency talk about. But if we take a step back and look at this from an Abu Dhabi perspective, I think they see in him someone who is very driven and someone who is tough enough to kind of make things work. His agenda is very much geared towards allowing oil and gas, allowing big oil to be part of the climate debate.

and that's the big point of controversy, right? He very much sees it as, you know, they're big stakeholders in the energy transition, and it doesn't make sense to keep them out because they have to be part of the solution. It's a game changer for many because if you look back at COP 26 in Glasgow, these people were completely persona on ungrada, you know, the fossil fuel industry was just not part of that climate summit. But I think things have changed a lot globally since then, especially last year with the Ukraine war.

I think a lot of people realized that the energy transition wasn't kind of a flip switch, that you could just move from one system to another. And a lot of people, even within the renewables industry, started to say, well, wait a minute, oil and gas, there's a lot of money in it. There's a lot of research in it. There's a lot of engineers in it. And we could use some of that experience in deducing our own solutions. The world could benefit from them decarbonizing.

And so that's very much his philosophy. There's a completely other side to the debate. People like Al Gore, who's been a long time climate activists have criticized Dr. Sultan's presidency very much. He says he fears that oil and gas are hijacking the summit. They're hijacking the UN process. What about for the UAE, what would it mean to them for this COP to be seen as a success on their patch? You know, the UAE, they like to succeed and they like to succeed big, right? They like to do everything to the maximum.

And so, of course, they put a lot of energy into this and they want to make a big success out of this. I've asked Dr. Sultan, when I've interviewed him before, you know, when this is all over and you sit and look back on it, what is success to you? And he's always said success is people working together. Success is to him is inclusivity in the debate. And with this cop being kind of the first global assessment of the Paris Agreement of 2015 in which countries committed themselves to limit global warming, that's the main measure of success for him. You know, we know we're falling short. We know the earth is heating up. But how can we get more countries to commit to more so that, that we keep this kind of 1.5 degrees Celsius, you know, limiting global warming as our North Star, he always says. That's what we should be all focused on. He's often said the enemy is the emissions. It's not the oil and gas industry per se. It's the emissions. So if we figure out ways to control the emissions, we're good. Of course, many people disagree with him. For many people, but a large part of the problem is the oil and gas industry. So it'll be a good.

be interesting to see after all of this is over whether people will judge this to be a success or not. So should fossil fuels be at the table if governments are trying to phase them out? Well, perhaps they should put their money where their mouth is. Global fossil fuel subsidies have actually grown to $7 trillion since an agreement at COP26 in Glasgow to phase them out. What is going on? Sarah McFarlane is in London. So, Sarah, at a time when we're trying to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, why are fossil fuel subsidies increasing? Well, in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Russia was the number one supplier of gas to Europe. So Russia then cut gas supplies to Europe quite drastically.

They more than halved their pipeline gas exports to Europe. This sent gas prices and electricity prices soaring, and then you saw European governments rushed to try and shield their consumers from those price increases. And that meant that European governments more than doubled fossil fuel subsidies to 310 billion, according to the IMF. So will there be a concrete pledge to lower fossil fuel subsidies at this year's COP? Well, there actually was a pledge back at COP 26 in Glasgow two years ago, where all of the governments did agree that they needed to phase our inefficient fossil fuel subsidies. What was missing at that time was any kind of deadline. And there's a question over, will we get a deadline

in Dubai at COP 28? European countries are suggesting that the year should be 2030. However, it's unclear at this stage whether there's global support for that kind of deadline. Kate, Valerie, are all of the participants going to really be focused? on phasing down or phasing out fossil fuels? Or do you expect we're going to see more focus on things like carbon capture and storage or technologies that might make, I don't know, perhaps a smaller difference? Yes, there will definitely be a host of opinions and proposals put forward. Some of them will be very aggressive in tackling fossil fuels. Some will be, as you say, looking toward alternatives that don't include winding down fossil use at all, but rather

focusing on carbon capture technology. Valerie has more of an insight into what these various agendas are. Well, what we're seeing now is a very strong push to get a goal included in this agreement that would cover a tripling of renewable energy deployment kind of globally. And there's kind of broad support for that. The U.S., the EU, the UAE are kind of leading this push. They have at this point more than 60 countries agreeing to that. What's more tricky is what that is accompanied with. Should there be a fossil fuel phase out, phase down, unabated fossil fuel production, there's going to be a real scrutiny over the language that we use to ensure that while renewables increase, the use of fossil fuels or the reliance on fossil fuels

decreases. And that's the tricky part. So I think we're going to see a lot of wrestling with language over how to capture that kind of phase down. that's significant is the increased focus on the word unabated. The word unabated before the word emissions, that's being understood effectively as emissions that are not captured by carbon capture, which opens the door to carbon capture. If you can show that your emissions are being captured, then as the argument goes, it's fine to be producing them. That insertion of the word unabated is hugely focal now, and we'll hear the word unabated said many, many times throughout carb. So Valerie, I want to turn to carbon capture and storage, which we've talked about. What exactly is that?

When we talk about carbon capture, I think there's carbon capture and storage or carbon capture and storage and utilization. That's where you have this technology that you place at a point source, like a smokestack, some kind of industrial facility, and it captures the carbon directly from that facility. What we're seeing now is a rush of investment in a different type of carbon capture technology called direct air capture to carbon removal technology. These are facilities that don't need to be at the source of the emissions, but they are almost like little vacuums that suck the carbon out of the atmosphere.

So the idea behind direct air capture is that it can remove historical emissions. It can cancel out emissions. can get you to negative carbon emissions because it doesn't necessarily have to be the source of the emissions. Is this a real viable solution? Scientists say that in order to meet our global climate goals to keep on track to not go beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature rise, we'll need these technologies in play. And I think there is consensus that there will need to be that technology. The question is to deploy it at the scale that's needed. I don't know if everyone is in as much of, agreement as to how much we want to invest in those technologies. And I think there is a concern

because you have oil and gas companies, really supportive of both CCS and direct air capture, that it distracts from the work that needs to be done just to decarbonize, to move away from fossil fuels to deploy more renewable energy, to reduce production, to focus on efficiency. So I think some people see it as a distraction, a fig leaf, a promise that it will take a while to commercial scale. It involves a lot of investment up front and it also requires a lot of government. These issues become even more tense now as we come up upon deadlines for emissions cutting because, of course, financing is finite. If we spend all our financing on building up carbon capture technologies rather than deploying renewable energy, for example, we could get into

trouble. So a lot of the anxiety comes from knowing that we have finite resources and how best to deploy them should they be going toward technologies. Some argue that more should be going toward adaptation, right? We are already warming now and we will be warming for decades into the future, regardless of what we do with emissions. So we will have to prepare. And not a lot of money is going into those preparations as of now. Speaking of economics, climate finance is a big part of COP, right? Day one saw an early win with the deal on the loss and damage fund, the fund to help the poorest and most vulnerable countries pay for the impact of climate change. But there are other climate finance issues at play, right?

So money is a very tense issue in the COP negotiations. Tackling climate change is hugely expensive. Tackling the consequences of climate change is very expensive. We're seeing these billion-dollar disasters increase with frequency across the globe, and that is because the weather is getting crazier, and our assets and values are all over the place. There are several baskets of, you know, quote unquote climate finance. But yes, the bulk of it initially, originally was meant to come from wealthy nations who are responsible for emitting the most emissions into the atmosphere historically.

So in the original framework agreement from 1995, it was agreed that they would take on a larger burden of tackling climate change. It's called common but differentiated responsibilities. So the agreement was that they would be paying money into a, fund toward vulnerable countries, poor countries to help them both with their energy transition and with adapting for the consequences of a warmer world. So that could be sea level rise. That could be if it's an agricultural country that might see a future with less agriculture, how are they going to change their economy? That is still a tense discussion. The money that's coming through is still not enough to cover what's needed by a long shot. The Western nations also

have failed in meeting past pledges for $100 billion per year that caused a lot of mistrust. This year, they're meeting that pledge, and in 2025 they'll be discussing to what extent it should be increased that amount of climate finance from wealthy nations to the poor. These climate-related disasters that Katie mentioned will form the backdrop of much of what is discussed at COP. And it's good to remember just how many significant and frankly depressing records we've broken on earth this year. Gloria Dickey covers climate and environment. So we've seen a lot of records broken in 2023.

First, we had the hottest day, which led into the hottest month in July, and now we're going to see the hottest year ever recorded. And amid that, we've seen a lot of really chaotic and depressing other records unfold, too. We've seen the longest-lasting cyclone with the most accumulated energy ever on record. We've seen record wildfires burning across Canada this summer. and we've seen record heat waves in places like Phoenix and in China this year as well. How sure are scientists that what we're seeing is directly attributable to climate change? Are we still having that conversation?

It's tricky, and that gets into this realm of science known as climate attribution in terms of looking at, you know, how much can we say that climate change made a certain event more likely or made it worse? And that's still difficult for them to kind of pick out those different signals. But in cases like heat waves, they can say if this were to have happened in a cooler world, this heat wave would have been less likely to happen in the first place. But it also would have been maybe one or two degrees cooler as well, which makes the impact less devastating.

But it depends on the event type. So with hurricanes, we also know, you know, warmer sea temperatures, kind of fuel worse and more intense cyclones and hurricanes. But in cases like drought, sometimes it's a little bit harder to figure out the signal there. What are some of the most catastrophic climate events to happen this year? Some of the most catastrophic things that we saw this year were Storm Daniel in Libya and Cyclone Freddie when it hit Madagascar and Malawi. But in those two events, there were a lot of other factors that probably played a role with Cyclone Freddie. Actually, the sea temperatures weren't that warm then.

So it's a little unclear as to why that cyclone was so bad and so long lasting when it hit. And I think there'll be studies to come on that. Storm Daniel, death toll over 10,000, but some of that just had to do with city design too. And that's where these things get tricky. But in terms of, you know, events that were most likely made worse by climate change, if you look at Hurricane Otis that hit Mexico a couple months ago, you know, that was a very rapidly intensifying hurricane. It jumped to a category five and 24 hours when it made landfall. And that tracks with what scientists say is happening with climate change. So again, it's a bit hard to pin things directly to climate change. But some of these catastrophic events were certainly made more likely and worse because of climate change. events becoming more likely to happen? Yes. So heat waves, again, are becoming more likely to happen. I mean, every single event differs somewhat, but basically you're, you know, you're kind of layering heat on top of heat when you think of heat waves and warmer atmospheres also hold more moisture. So that means you see worse rains and flooding in many parts of the world, too. In terms of things like wildfires,

it's not just temperatures that fuel wildfires, but if you have a spark against a backdrop of a record warm summer or a record warm year, you know, you're kind of tilting the scales towards that fire burning out of control and becoming a record-breaking wildfire too. What's been the economic cost of some of these disasters? I think it's a bit hard to measure the costs of these, but we do know that the U.S., for example, saw a record number of billion-dollar disasters in 2023. We also know that the Greece wildfires cost, you know, more than 1.5 billion euros. But at the same time, unfortunately, a lot of these disasters are hitting areas that are already rural, they might be poor. So I think simply looking at

the economic cost is a bit naive in terms of how devastating these events can be when maybe you wipe out subsistence agriculture or maybe you jeopardize food security a lot more. And those numbers aren't necessarily captured just in dollar figures. Covering climate change is a tough beat for a reporter, as I'm sure you're both aware, but there has been some, dare we say, progress made in the fight. Let's talk about methane and what progress has has been made in what could be made at COP. Valerie? So methane is a potent greenhouse gas. It's not as prevalent as carbon dioxide, but it's almost 80 times as powerful and it's short-lived.

And so there's really kind of a growing consensus that if you tackle methane, you really take a big bite out of global emissions. So it doesn't live in the atmosphere for as long. That's right. But it's nastier. It's nastier. But unlike CO2, where some of the solutions are quite expensive and, um, will take a while to be commercialized.

Some of the solutions for methane are available now. And a lot of people like to make this reference to, you know, it's a plumbing problem. You seal leaky pipes and infrastructure. And I think what we'll see is, you know, two years ago in Glasgow, the U.S. and EU led this kind of push for a global methane pledge in which countries would commit to reducing methane 30% by 2030, so 2030 is not that far away from now. So far, there are now 150 countries that have signed on to this. And I think what this cop will do is say, okay, that's great. There's a lot of enthusiasm, but methane is still on the rise. Now it's time to, first of all, commit more money to

help countries deal with their methane emissions. And you have some countries like Turkmenistan, which is a methane super emitter that has this huge methane footprint. I think we're going to see a where we'll see financial support to some of these countries to help them target methane. And I think we'll also be seeing more details from countries that are taking steps to actually, according to their own national laws, tackle methane. And I think they want to kind of put it all together because this could be potentially a good news story. Speaking of getting everyone to the table, the president of the United States is not expected

to attend this year. What does that tell us, Katie? Is COP still seen as important as perhaps it once was? Yes, absolutely. It's still important. The fact that President Biden has decided not to come, you know, every year there are some leaders who don't come for various domestic reasons. There could be any reason. We had many years recently where she didn't come from China. It doesn't make or break the talks. What's important to realize with the United States presence is we have John Kerry of the UN, Special Climate Envoy, who has been actively engaging with other nations around the world to reach consensus on these issues. And he will be representing the United States. The other delegations

will not see Biden not coming as a snub. It's just more real politic this year. It didn't work out. Valerie, Katie, how hopeful are you right now about the trajectory of fighting climate change and the progress that might be made at COP 28? It is very worrying to see many countries not taking pledges as seriously as they could be. Same goes with financing because the need is so enormous. That said, humanity is an amazing species. We have done incredible things in the past. You know, we could pull it off.

There are incredibly smart people working on this. And unfortunately, it may take, you know, often what it takes. takes as a little bit more disaster before people wake up and realize this is imminent. I would say I'm actually, we should end on an optimistic note. But, you know, the context that we're dealing with here is there's a great pushback against a lot of the clean energy, clean transportation developments we've been seeing around the world. There's a pushback against electric vehicles, not just in the United States, but in Europe and elsewhere. There's been a pushback against ESG laws. So all those environmental, social governments.

measures that many companies were very keen to kind of promote in the past couple of years. We've seen, we've seen them backing down. I think the cop offers an opportunity to reset that focus. But we're dealing with a global context where we're seeing a kind of regression and a pulling back away from some of the progress. We have a U.S. election coming up where a lot of the clean energy investment that's come out of the Inflation Reduction Act, that's going to be a target. So there are a lot of political headwinds, but COP always offers that chance to make the best case for saving the planet and to really have that positive message. So we'll see. We'll see how much inspiration we'll get from our world leaders.

But as a journalist, I'm never fully hopeful. Change is hard for everyone. And we're asking the whole world or what's being asked of the whole world is an enormous change, economic change, social change. families who have spent generations, for example, you know, in one industry, farming, for example, or coal suddenly have to change. I mean, these are existential issues that each country is dealing with and navigating. And there is no easy answer or one formula that fits all. But there also is no planet B. There is right now.

There is no planet B. Yeah. All right. I'll leave it there, guys. Thank you so much. Thank you. That's it for this special weekend episode. Tomorrow we'll focus on how one small village in Pakistan

at the foot of a melting glacier is trying to adapt to the effects of climate change. Thanks to Katie, Valerie, Gloria, Maha, Sarah and the entire climate reporting team that has made this episode possible. Reuters World News is produced by Jonah Green, Tara Oaks, David Spencer, Christopher Waljasper and myself. Our senior producer is Carmel Crimmons.

Lieder de Kretzer edits the show. Engineering and sound design by Josh Summer. To make sure you know what's going on in the world, listen in for 10 minutes every weekday. And don't forget to subscribe on your favourite podcast player or download the Reuters app.