DUBAI: Dr Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, Head of the climate change and health units at the World Health Organization, says equitable and rapid cut in the use of fossil fuels must start today to save millions of lives. “We are losing one life every five seconds due to fossil fuels,” he warns in an interview with TNIE
The cries of greenwashing are resonating outside the closed-door negotiating rooms in Dubai. The fossil fuel lobby and ‘unabated’ politics ended the first week of COP28 without much headway on contentious matters like the inaugural Global Stocktake (GST) and Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA). While the climate talks at COP28 have centered around the need for a fossil fuel phase-out, some large oil and gas-producing countries like Saudi Arabia are calling for this to be limited to ‘unabated’ fossil fuels.
So, what is ‘unabated’ and ‘abated’? A commitment to only phase out ‘unabated’ fossil fuels implies that fossil fuels still have a future – if they are ‘abated’. The controversial Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies, which so far remained practically “useless”, is being pushed aggressively at this UN summit. This, experts say, could send a dangerous and incorrect signal to investors that CCS can enable continual large-scale fossil fuel consumption without busting through climate goals.
In an interview with this newspaper, Dr Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, Head of the climate change and health unit at the World Health Organization (WHO), said it is true that it’s the emissions (greenhouse gases) that are the problem rather than fossil fuels. However, there is difficulty in saying that at the moment, considering only under 0.1% of the carbon emissions are captured and stored. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated only 15% of cumulative reduction in emissions can be achieved by 2070 through CCS, which is not good enough. This also means the remaining 85% should come from the actual reduction of fossil fuel usage.”
The IPCC’s latest working group III report states that abated fossil fuel use implies ‘substantially reducing the amount of greenhouse gases emitted throughout the life cycle; for example, capturing around 90% or more CO2 from power plants, or 50–80% of fugitive methane emissions from energy supply. Available evidence suggests these standards are far from met.
For example, the Gorgon project in Australia, the largest CCS capture plant in the IEA’s database run by the United States oil and gas giant Chevron, is operating at just a third of its capacity and there is no sign of it being scaled up.
86 giga tonne carbon bomb
A briefing from Climate Analytics released recently called the CCS technology an 86 billion tonnes carbon bomb aimed at derailing a fossil phase-out.
As part of the full assessment, IPCC AR6 also explores potential futures that rely on extremely high deployment rates of CCS. These pathways are tied to the massive upscaling of CCS with very high capture rates. The Climate Analytics team looked at a high CCS pathway – selected from the IPCC’s AR6 database as the 1.5°C low overshoot pathway with the largest deployment of fossil CCS – to quantify that CCS is not as effective at abatement as the industry claims.
The analysis found that the risk of excess emissions from poor capture rates is high - as much as 86 giga tonnes of carbon in the scenario with high fossil CCS reliance. This represents over 30% of the remaining global carbon budget for 1.5°C estimated to be around 275 GtCO2.
Dr Diarmid from WHO told TNIE: “We are losing one life every five seconds due to fossil fuels. It is imperative that COP28, at least, sets the tone for a rapid phase-down of fossil fuels today. If your goal to phase out is 2050, it’s very different to wait till 2049 and then cut as opposed to starting earlier. The difference is if you wait till 2049, you already put a lot of carbon into the atmosphere and also lost a lot of lives that otherwise could have been saved. It is better to have phase down starting now, rather than the cliff-faced phase out in 2049,” he said responding to a question on the raging debate over phase out or phase down of fossil fuels.
A senior delegate from the Brazilian government, which will be the host for COP30, told TNIE there is a lack of trust. “Frankly speaking, countries are doing nothing to align with 1.5oC. So far, there have been only pledges, which are not legally binding, at this UN summit. It is important for countries to put carbon budgets without which civil society and media will not know whether countries are doing enough.”
‘Oil COP’
Many critics are already calling this UN summit an “Oil COP”, considering there is a four-fold increase in fossil fuel lobbyists gaining access to climate negotiations compared to last year’s global event.
According to Kick Big Polluters Out, a staggering 2,456 lobbyists, representing some of the world’s largest polluters, have been given accreditation to attend this year’s critical negotiations, which is being run by the President of the UAE’s national oil company, which in itself is an aberration.
The full list, which this newspaper reviewed, showed a vast number of fossil fuel lobbyists were granted access to the COP as part of a trade association. Nine out of the 10 biggest of these groups came from the Global North. The largest was the Geneva-based International Emissions Trading Association, which brought 116 people including representatives from big polluters such as Shell, TotalEnergies and Norway’s Equinor.
France brought fossil fuel giants such as TotalEnergies and EDF. Italy brought a team of ENI representatives, and the EU brought employees of BP, ENI, and ExxonMobil.