UNITED NATIONS ~ Conference of Parties ~ COP28 ~ What Crisis Really?

Why some climate experts are criticizing what’s happened at the COP28 climate conference

>>> From an Interview by Geoff Bennett, PBS News, December 12, 2023

As the COP28 climate conference comes to a close, countries are racing against the clock. More than 100 nations are pushing for a firm commitment to stop the use of coal, oil and gas after earlier drafts advocated for eventually phasing out fossil fuels. Geoff Bennett discussed more with Michael Mann, one of the climate experts critical of what’s happened at the summit.

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Geoff Bennett: As the United Nations climate conference, known as COP 28, comes to a close in Dubai, countries are racing against the clock. More than 100 countries, including the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, are pushing for a firm commitment to stop the use of coal, oil and gas, after earlier drafts advocated for eventually phasing out fossil fuels.

Michael Mann has been among those climate experts critical of what’s happened at this summit. He’s the director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. His new book is “Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis.”

Michael Mann, welcome back to the “NewsHour.”

Dr. Michael Mann, University of Pennsylvania: Thanks, Geoff. It’s good to be with you.

Geoff Bennett: You co-wrote an op-ed in The L.A. Times saying that not only has COP 28 failed to meet this moment demanding dramatic and immediate climate action; it has made a caricature of it. In what ways?

Dr. Michael Mann: Well, OK, first of all, the host country, United Arab Emirates, is a fossil fuel state. It’s a petro state.

And the president of COP 28, appointed by the host, is, in fact, an oil executive. And so there are reasons to be skeptical from the very start, given just those plain facts, and everything we have seen since, the fact that — again, that the president of COP 28 has been using language claiming that there’s no science to back up the need to phase out fossil fuels, when, of course, the science overwhelmingly indicates we have to bring carbon emissions down dramatically to avert catastrophic warming.

And he even used climate-denier tropes, like we will all be back in the caves if we make a clean energy transition. And so the fact that we haven’t seen much progress, we have seen other petro states like Saudi Arabia now say that there’s no way that they will agree to language to phase out fossil fuels — in fact, they won’t even agree to language to phase down, whatever that means, to phase down fossil fuels.

And so there’s a lot of pessimism right now that a few bad apples are spoiling the possibility of a meaningful agreement, as this window of opportunity is closing. If we don’t see progress now, it becomes increasingly difficult to see a way to keep warming below a catastrophic three degrees Fahrenheit.

Geoff Bennett: And yet these COP summits, they’re the only venue for global climate change negotiations. So what’s a better path forward? What reforms are needed?

Dr. Michael Mann: Yes, that’s right.

And so we resist calls to dissolve the entire COP process, because, as you just said, it is the only multilateral framework we have for global climate negotiations. And polluters would like nothing more than to see the U.N. conference of the parties disappear.

What we do need is to mend it, not end it. We argue, for example, that we can’t allow a single country like Saudi Arabia to prevent the agreement from passing. And so there should be something instead like a supermajority; 75 percent of participating countries have to agree to a particular resolution for it to pass.

But you can’t have a system where one bad actor like Saudi Arabia can block any progress at all. That’s where we are right now. And there need to be penalties. In the past, the enforcement mechanism was called name and shame. For countries who don’t make a good-faith effort to participate in the negotiations, you call them out. You try to shame them.

But some of these countries, like Saudi Arabia, have shown they have no shame. And so there need to be real penalties for bad actors who essentially are trying to prevent any meaningful progress from taking place.

Geoff Bennett: Understanding that critics have made — they have made the point that oil interests have co-opted COP, there are any number of countries who say that completely phasing out fossil fuels hurts them economically and puts them at a disadvantage.

Do they have a point?

Dr. Michael Mann: Well, we no longer kill whales for whale oil because something better came along. That was fossil fuels two centuries ago.

And now something else has come along, something better has come along, clean energy. What we need to do is to provide the incentives for developing countries to leapfrog past the fossil fuel stage of their economic development. We can’t afford for them to make the same mistakes we made.

So we have got to provide assistance to help developing countries develop clean energy infrastructure. It’s win-win. Clean energy means a better planet, a better environment, more jobs. There are far more jobs available in clean energy installation than there are in the largely automated fossil fuel industry.

And we also know that petro states tend to be authoritative states, antidemocratic countries. And so all of the things that we would like to see, more widespread democracy, a cleaner environment, good jobs, clean jobs for people, all of that is favored by a proactive effort to transition. We’re not talking about sort of stopping all fossil fuel production cold turkey.

What we’re talking about is a steady transition, bringing carbon emissions down 50 percent this decade, bringing them down to zero by mid-century. And we have the technology to do that, renewable energy, solar, wind, geothermal. We don’t need new technology. We just need the political will to make this transition.

Geoff Bennett: Michael Mann, thanks, as always, for your insights.