COP28: How Tipping Points Create a House of Cards

“Phase out” or “phase down?” That’s the question at COP28 in Dubai. However, this shouldn’t be the question. All scientists will tell you we should phase out (to practically zero, with a tiny margin for unavoidable emissions that should be compensated).

So, is the actual question about how fast we should phase out? We also know the answer: we have to start with an emissions reduction of about 45 percent between now and 2030 to stay below the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold as agreed in Paris.

The real question should, therefore, be: how will we get to the needed rapid phasing out of the fossil fuels that have been the foundation of the world’s spectacular economic development since the start of the Industrial Revolution?

Not so fast: although more than 100 countries want a decision at COP28 to call for a “phase out” of fossil fuels, the countries in Dubai need consensus to move forward, and that includes agreement on such a formulation from countries whose economies are based on the export of fossil fuels.

Balancing dual roles

One of those countries is this year’s host: the United Arab Emirates (Dubai and Abu Dhabi are two of those emirates). The CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, ADNOC, Sultan al-Jaber, is also chairing COP28; in other words, he chairs the meeting where many want to stop selling his company’s product.

If ADNOC would have changed course and focused entirely on low-carbon solutions (for which it has reserved 15 billion dollars), there would be scope to find synergy between these two responsibilities. However, according to Global Witness, ADNOC plans to spend between now and 2030 more than one billion dollars every month on oil and gas production. This is about seven times as much as it says it will spend on low-carbon solutions.

So, instead of a 45 percent decrease in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, ADNOC is expected to spend more than 13 billion dollars on oil and gas that year, which means a 43 percent increase.

Although ADNOC recently announced it would seek to become net zero by 2045, Global Witness’ analysis concludes that it will spend a staggering amount of close to 14 billion dollars in that year and that the company will have invested 387 billion in oil and gas by 2050, which is the year that the UN says the global economy must achieve net zero emissions.

OPEC’s opposition

Thirteen oil- and gas-producing countries are united in the OPEC cartel; these countries have produced about 40 percent of the world’s oil over the last decade. OPEC has warned its members about the negotiations of a “fossil fuels phase out.” It calls on its members not to accept decisions that target the energy source. Instead, the formulation should be about emissions.

In secret letters seen by several press agencies and newspapers, including the Guardian, OPEC warns that a decision to phase out fossil fuels would “put our people’s prosperity and future at risk.”

As I wrote recently, global emissions are still rising, and the peak in emissions could be reached in the next few years. However, after reaching the peak, new emissions will still contribute to global warming until these are reduced to (net) zero.

We have all seen, and many of us experienced, the increase in extreme weather; scientists warn that its impact on lives and livelihoods will rapidly get much worse once the earth warms above 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times.

Tipping points

This was reconfirmed just days ago when more than 200 scientists published the new Global Tipping Points Report. Their study identifies about 25 tipping points in the Earth system. One of these, the widespread loss of coral reefs in warm water, is likely at 1.2 degrees Celsius, which is about the warming the world has experienced so far.

Four other tipping points are possible at this level of warming, including the collapse of ice sheets in the West Antarctic and Greenland. At 1.5 degrees Celsius, some of these tipping points become likely. It is profoundly worrying that most economic assessments of climate change still ignore tipping point risks.

In recent weeks, we have seen several more populist leaders winning national elections, which seems to be a worldwide trend. It raises the question of whether societies also have negative tipping points.

This thought is not new; for years, I have called for more attention to the impact of climate change on security. Planetary security connects the physical changes on our planet and the societal, political, and security changes.

Extreme weather disasters, conflicts, or forced migration can drive society toward a tipping point beyond which political polarization, authoritarianism, and financial instability increase, and motivation for a transition toward a more sustainable society will be lost.

To illustrate this, look around you in the world we live in. We see a remarkable increase in natural instability, such as biodiversity loss, ever-increasing pollution levels, and weather extremes like droughts, heatwaves, floods, wildfires, or hurricanes. There are also worrying geopolitical developments, where established systems of democracy, multilateralism, and peaceful resolutions of conflicts are replaced by events and systems as extreme as the weather and as polluted as our atmosphere.

Like the physical tipping points, they are hard to pinpoint precisely and are often clear for all to see only once the tipping point has been passed. In the future, historians may look back and describe a few of them as black swans: impactful events that, in hindsight, seem bound to happen, and you wonder why they weren’t accepted as a likely risk before the tipping point was reached.

A House of Cards

Combine the many physical and societal tipping points, and you get a house of cards that looks remarkably like the world we live in today. One where the global thermostat is set at maximum heating, where we are reaching physical tipping points beyond which there is no way back to the planetary conditions we grew up in, even if we completely phase out fossil fuels. A house of cards where previously unimaginable extremes lead to increasingly desperate populations and where government leaders turn to short-term fixes instead of structural measures and prefer denial instead of science. You can pull out a few playing cards, but the system has a tipping point where the whole house of cards collapses.

And these thoughts bring us back to the present challenges for the delegates in Dubai. I guess many of them feel the burden of being in the negotiating room where the future of life on this planet is on the table. They share the room with those who feel the burden of their leaders instructing them to negotiate for their short-term self-interests. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons, act 28, last scene.

The curtain opened with Denmark’s climate minister, Dan Jøgensen, a key player at the COP and its global stocktake. He stated: “We cannot negotiate with nature. The climate cannot compromise. No well-meaning words will change a single thing unless we act. This week may be our last opportunity to bring us on course to keeping 1.5 Celsius alive.”

It may sound like a miracle is needed to find consensus on effective phasing out in time, but over the years, I have learned to be cautious in predicting outcomes.

It is clear what the wisest policy would be, but it takes a few more days to know if politicians have the collective wisdom to choose that policy.

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Notes:

https://global-tipping-points.org/

https://www.globalwitness.org/en/press-releases/cop28-oil-company-to-spend-1-bn-a-month-on-fossil-fuels-this-decade-despite-green-claims/

https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/articles/2020-12-11/carbon-neutrality-2050-the-world’s-most-urgent-mission

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/08/opec-rails-against-fossil-fuel-phase-out-at-cop28-in-leaked-letters