Chris Bowen says agreement on global fossil fuel phase out central to Australia’s renewable energy plans

The Australian climate change minister, Chris Bowen, has declared phasing out fossil fuels globally is central to Australia’s push to become a renewable energy superpower, and named Saudi Arabia as a block to agreement on the issue at the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai.

Bowen said the most important issue at the conference was reaching an agreement that kept the goal of limiting heating to 1.5C within reach, and dealing with fossil fuels was key to that.

It came as representatives from nearly all countries at the two-week summit waited anxiously on the president of the Cop, Sultan Al Jaber, to release the proposed text of a Cop28 agreement. The talks are scheduled to finish at 11am Tuesday local time [6pm AEDT] but few expected the heavily contested negotiations to meet that deadline.

Al Jaber convened a majlis – a meeting in the traditional form of an elders’ conference in the United Arab Emirates – between all countries late on Sunday in an attempt to reach consensus on points of deadlock, including whether fossil fuels should be phased out or phased down.

Bowen told the majlis that fossil fuels must have “no ongoing role to play in our energy systems” if the world was to keep 1.5C alive.

“I speak as the climate and energy minister of one of the world’s largest fossil fuel exporters,” he said. “We also live in the Pacific, and we are not going to see our brothers and sisters inundated and their countries swallowed by the seas.”

On Monday, Bowen said countries such as Saudi Arabia had “a very different view”. He said the Saudi energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, had made the country’s position – that the problem was greenhouse gas emissions, not fossil fuels – “blunt and clear” at the majlis.

“I had a meeting, a long meeting, with the Saudi minister yesterday where we compared notes on our different perspectives,” he said. “Not every country is yet on the same page.”

Bowen said Australia’s economic future was as a “renewable energy superpower”, and seizing that opportunity meant a transition away from fossil fuels.

The minister told the majlis that a global stocktake for the summit had found the world was not on track to meet the 1.5C heating goal. He said global emissions must peak by 2025 and be cut by 43% by 2030 and 60% by 2035 compared with 2019 levels, and that renewable energy should be tripled by 2030. “I think that should be reflected in the outcome,” he said.

Bowen said there were “many ways” the language adopted at the talks could reflect that fossil fuels did not have a future, and told the president: “We’ll be flexible with you to find the pathway to give you the chance you need to write that into history.”

He signalled that could include attaching the word “unabated” to any decision about phasing out fossil fuels. Unabated is a controversial and undefined term at climate talks that is usually taken to mean that fossil fuel use can continue if emissions are reduced through carbon capture and storage, a technology that scientists and activists point out has not proven commercially viable.

Bowen said talking about abatement of fossil fuels in a deal should not be seen as a justification for countries to just keep burning them. “We don’t need to phase out fossil fuel emissions, we need to end the use of fossil fuels in our energy systems, with abatement as a backstop and goalkeeper, not as an excuse for delay or inaction,” he said.

His intervention came in an often impassioned session in which Al Jaber asked countries to speak without notes or a prepared speech.

Diego Pacheco, chief spokesperson for the Like Minded Group of Developing Countries that includes China, India and Saudi Arabia, accused the US, Norway, Australia and Canada of hypocrisy for supporting an agreement to phase out fossil fuels while planning to expand their own production.

Saudi Arabia has been accused of holding the talks hostage. The secretary general of the OPEC oil cartel, Haitham al-Ghais, this week wrote to the organisation’s 13 member countries warning them Cop28 could “put our people’s prosperity and future at risk”, and urging them to “reject any text or formula that targets energy, ie fossil fuels, rather than emissions”.

There are also ongoing differences between wealthy nations and more recently emerging economies such as China over relative responsibility for cutting emissions and funding for vulnerable countries.

Vanuatu’s climate change minister, Ralph Regenvanu, told the Guardian he backed a call by Pacific and small island states for a deal to completely phase-out fossil fuels and fossil fuel subsidies, and an immediate halt to fossil fuel expansion.

Regenvanu said while he did not agree with Bowen on “unabated” his country was “really happy with what Australia has been saying at this Cop”. “It’s a real change,” he said.

He said the major problem with Australia’s stance remained its huge coal and gas exports. He called on countries to back a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty as it would require countries to act on the coal, gas and oil they exported and not just what they used at home.

Bowen’s position on abated fossil fuels drew sharp criticism from climate campaigners.

Greenpeace’s Pacific adviser, Shiva Gounden, said the minister had the opportunity to “speak from a place of empathy” during the majlis but instead continued to inclusion of fossil fuels with abatement. He said it had been disrespectful; for Bowen to say he stood alongside its Pacific neighbours. “He spoke like Australia was the moral authority on climate justice now, while the country still expands new fossil fuel projects,” he said.

The director of Climate Solutions for Australia, Barry Traill, said much of Bowen’s speech was a “clear and blunt explanation” of how fossil fuels must be removed but it was frustrating that he supported a word that could be used by “frankly bullshit projects stating that they will remove pollution after it’s been put into the atmosphere”.