Failure of Cop28 on fossil fuel phase-out is ‘devastating’, say scientists

The failure of Cop28 to call for a phase-out of fossil fuels is “devastating” and “dangerous” given the urgent need for action to tackle the climate crisis, scientists have said.

One called it a “tragedy for the planet and our future” while another said it was the “dream outcome” for the fossil fuel industry.

The UN climate summit ended on Wednesday with a compromise deal that called for a “transition away” from fossil fuels. The stronger term “phase-out” had been backed by 130 of the 198 countries negotiating in Dubai but was blocked by petrostates including Saudi Arabia.

The deal was hailed as historic as it was the first citing of fossil fuels, the root cause of the climate crisis, in 30 years of climate negotiations. But scientists said the agreement contained many loopholes and did not match the severity of the climate emergency.

“The lack of an agreement to phase out fossil fuels was devastating,” said Prof Michael Mann, a climatologist and geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania in the US. “To ‘transition away from fossil fuels’ was weak tea at best. It’s like promising your doctor that you will ‘transition away from doughnuts’ after being diagnosed with diabetes.”

Dr Magdalena Skipper, the editor in chief of the science journal Nature, said: “The science is clear – fossil fuels must go. World leaders will fail their people and the planet unless they accept this reality.”

An editorial in Nature said the failure over the phase-out was “more than a missed opportunity”, it was “dangerous” and ran “counter to the core goals laid down in the 2015 Paris climate agreement” of limiting global heating to 1.5C (2.7F) above preindustrial levels.

“The climate doesn’t care who emits greenhouse gases,” the editorial continued. “There is only one viable path forward, and that is for everybody to phase out almost all fossil fuels as quickly as possible.”

Sir David King, the chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group and a former UK chief scientific adviser, said: “The wording of the deal is feeble. Ensuring 1.5C remains viable will require total commitment to a range of far-reaching measures, including full fossil fuel phase-out.”

There was a chasm between the stark statement of the emissions cuts needed and the action proposed to deliver those reductions, he said: “The Cop28 text recognises there is a need for ‘deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions’ to stay in line with 1.5C. But then it lists a whole bunch of efforts that don’t have a chance of achieving that.”

The scientists said the loopholes included the call to “accelerate” carbon capture and storage to trap emissions from burning fossil fuels, an option that can play a minor role at best.

Dr Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London, said: “Until fossil fuels are phased out, the world will continue to become a more dangerous, more expensive and more uncertain place to live. With every vague verb, every empty promise in the final text, millions more people will enter the frontline of climate change and many will die.”

Prof Martin Siegert, a polar scientist and deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Exeter, said: “The science is perfectly clear. Cop28, by not making a clear declaration to stop fossil fuel burning is a tragedy for the planet and our future. The world is heating faster and more powerfully than the Cop response to deal with it.”

Prof Mike Berners-Lee, an expert on carbon footprinting at Lancaster University, said: “Cop28 is the fossil fuel industry’s dream outcome, because it looks like progress, but it isn’t.”

Dr Elena Cantarello, a senior lecturer in sustainability science at Bournemouth University, UK, said: “It is hugely disappointing to see how a very small number of countries have been able to put short-term national interests ahead of the future of people and nature.”

Dr James Dyke, an associate professor in earth system dynamics at the University of Exeter, said: “Cop28 needed to deliver an unambiguous statement. While the agreement’s call for the need to transition away from fossil fuels is welcome, it has numerous caveats and loopholes that risks rendering it meaningless.

“That this deal has been hailed as a landmark is more a measure of previous failures than any step change when it comes to the increasingly urgent need to rapidly stop burning coal, oil and gas.”

The scientists comments echoed those of Anne Rasmussen, the lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States group, whose speech at the closing of Cop28 won a standing ovation from delegates: “It is not enough for us to reference the science and then make agreements that ignore what the science is telling us we need to do.”

Climate science was at the heart of a row that dominated the first week of the summit after the Guardian revealed comments by the Cop28 president, Sultan Al Jaber, in which he said: “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.” Al Jaber later said: “I have said over and over the phase-down and the phase-out of fossil fuel is inevitable. In fact, it is essential.”

Dr Lisa Schipper, a professor of development geography at the University of Bonn in Germany, said: “The early statement by the Cop president about the lack of science behind phasing out fossil fuels sent shockwaves to scientists, especially those who had contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s [most recent report], since the science in the report is so clear that fossil fuels need to be phased out to prevent a point of no return.”

Mann said Cop rules needed to be reformed, for example by allowing super-majorities to vote through decisions over the objections of holdout petrostates and by barring oil executives such as Al Jaber, who runs the United Arab Emirate’s state oil company, from presiding over future summits.

“Mend it, don’t end it,” Mann said. “Cops are our only multilateral framework for negotiating global climate policies. But the failure of Cop28 to achieve any meaningful progress at a time when our window of opportunity to limit warming below catastrophic levels is closing, is a source of great concern.”