The AFR View
COP28: Beware premature predictions of the death of fossil fuels
Whatever the final climate conference wording, given the clear lack of global consensus, we should be wary of predictions that oil’s days are numbered.
Multilateral agreements remain the key to effective global climate action, otherwise efforts by individual nations such as Australia to reach net zero emissions by 2050 risk failing to stop potentially catastrophic warming of the Earth this century.
Likewise, unilateral action by Australia such as a ban on coal exports that some anti-fossil fuel zealots demand would just see big-emitting nations India and China import fossil fuels from elsewhere.
For these “developing” countries, renewables are not as cheap and scalable as coal and increasingly gas as a way of ending their people’s energy poverty and fuelling economic growth. The machinations in the United Arab Emirates during the past two weeks have demonstrated once again how difficult getting a global agreement is. But the key objective should be lowering emissions to reduce the impact of climate change, rather than a do-or-die commitment to eliminating fossil fuels that ignores the risk of a disorderly energy transition.
A green activist storms the plenary hall at COP28, demanding an end to fossil fuels. Getty
The backdrop for the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference has been the international slippage in climate ambitions amid the global energy crisis of the past two years, triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Most notably in Europe, Germany has started burning coal again to generate electricity, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has done a U-turn and scaled back predecessor Boris Johnson’s green climate and energy policies.
Australia’s increasingly costly and delayed energy transition has run into the global renewables supply chain crunch and real-world physical, engineering and social licence constraints. The Albanese government has been forced to underwrite the financial risk of new renewable generation and storage projects to try to achieve its target of 82 per cent renewable energy by 2030. Energy realism has also led Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen to belatedly, rhetorically support the role of gas-fired firming generation while still excluding gas from the back-up mechanism that is supposed to keep the lights on when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t out.
Meanwhile, the national conversation is yet to grasp the need for the whole place to sharpen up given the massive challenge of closing down Australia’s fossil fuel sources of modern prosperity in coal, gas, and iron ore exports and having to compete effectively to become a green energy and critical minerals superpower.
This has allowed Australia to play the role of a good global climate citizen.
It’s easy – and probably justified – to pin the blame for the stoush over whether the meeting of 198 nations should support a “phase out” of fossil fuels to stop global warming exceeding 1.5 degrees by 2050 on the UAE hosts and other big oil and gas-pumping Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia. This has allowed Australia to play the role of a good global climate citizen and enhances our chances of co-hosting with the Pacific Islands the COP31 talks in 2026.
Mr Bowen has called on COP28 to send a clear signal to support the global transition away from fossil fuels, and that this is in Australia’s interests as a future green superpower. Yet the communiqué language that he has pushed for in Dubai – as the chairman of an “umbrella group” of 11 nations including Britain, New Zealand, Japan and Australia’s fellow fossil fuel producers the US, Norway and Canada – didn’t back the all-out fossil fuel phase-out that some member nations and climate activists called for.
The proposal to instead back a “phase-out of unabated fossil fuels” appears to be another example of the energy realism the world has confronted tempering ambitions on the global stage. This appears to recognise that the goal of net zero by 2050 is reducing carbon emissions to contain temperature rises and that this can be achieved by abating (not releasing into the atmosphere) emissions from fossil fuels via carbon capture and storage solutions that pump and lock carbon into the ground – a low-emission technology that is banned by law from being funded by the federal government’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
The bottom line here is that the backing for the use of abated fossil fuels acknowledges that coal, oil and gas will be phased down during a decades-long and hopefully orderly transition until affordable and reliable renewable replacements are online. Whatever the final COP28 wording, given the clear lack of global consensus, we should be wary of exaggerated reports of the premature death of fossil fuels.
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