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COP28 has been hailed by its organisers as a success with the last-minute declaration to “transition away” from fossil fuels included in the summit’s final agreement, now referred to as the UAE Consensus. 

But words are very important and, in this instance, they have been chosen very carefully.

Some say it’s a step in the right direction, but the difference between 'transitioning away' and 'phasing-out' fossil fuels, which was the preferred wording for the text at the start of negotiations, is huge. 

Despite universal recognition that limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels requires greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced by 43% by 2030, the new deal does not include a timetable or legal framework to compel countries to transition away from fossil fuels any time soon. 

The UAE Consensus also offers no assistance for or legislation to protect subsistence farming communities which are unlucky enough find themselves in the way of a fossil fuel project. And there is an understandable fear among climate change activists that the weak wording will be seen as a green light for the world’s coal, oil and gas producers to expand their operations in the Global South, with the human rights violations that typically go hand-in-hand with fossil fuel extraction, transportation and processing. 

Historically, Africa is responsible for less than 10% of global greenhouse gases. But that could be about to change as the big corporations, un-hampered by the COP28 agreement, queue up to buy licenses to exploit oil and gas resources across the continent.  

Dr Oulie Keita, executive director of Greenpeace Africa, described the fossil fuel industry’s current land grab in Africa as a form of neocolonialism and accused African governments of being addicted to oil and gas at COP28.

She said the “scramble for oil and gas” is not working for Africa and is not something that is welcomed by the people. “We have seen how oil and gas have actually destroyed communities, whether it's through public health issues, whether it's through food insecurity, because farmers don't have land to farm anymore.”

Dr Keita called for African governments to “resist the temptation of profits over people” and encouraged them to not be tempted by any “under the table deals”.  

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She added: “We need to put an end to this fossil fuel addiction and the people are ready to do whatever it takes for our governments to listen to us so that we are not continuing in this vicious cycle of poverty, of conflict. So stop it. We are saying no more.” 

And her message to the big oil and gas companies was unambiguous: “Stop drilling and start paying. We are going to be holding you accountable so that you pay for the damage that you've done in Africa.”

The East African Cude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) – a $5 billion project joint venture between the Uganda National Oil Company, TotalEnergies, China National Offshore Oil Corporation and the Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation – is one of the largest fossil fuel infrastructure projects in the world and an example of how successive COPs have failed to protect the Global South.  

When operational, the pipeline will transport oil 1443 km across east Africa from two newly established Ugandan oilfields – one on the shores of Lake Albert and the other in Murchison Falls National Park – to an oil terminal being built at Tanga on the coast Tanzania. Discussions are already underway to connect the pipeline to oil fields in other parts of the East African Community.

The project, according to the Human Rights Watch, will displace more than 100,000 people and has been linked to several accusations of human right violations. 

Eighteen families along the route of the pipeline in Uganda and Tanzania described how their homes had been destroyed and their land seized to make way for the pipeline. Those that opted for financial recompense told how the compensation they received was not enough replace the land they had lost. Some were still waiting for payments years after their land had been taken. Others were relocated to houses too small to accommodate their families, miles away from their communities, schools and churches and with plots of land so small there was no way of making a living, feeding their families or affording to send their children to school. 

Zaki Mamdoo, StopEACOP campaign coordinator for 360 Africa, travelled from South Africa to represent communities affected by the pipeline at COP28. He claims people who were living along the pipeline route have been driven off their land and says the EACOP compensation has been “unfair and entirely inadequate”, resulting in the loss of productive land for rural communities already living in extreme poverty. 

“Within the context of Uganda and Tanzania,” he said, “where people live in subsistence modes of existence, communities are largely rural and cultivate their own crops and food produce both to generate an income but also to feed themselves and their families.  PAPs [Project Affected People] have been moved to lands which are not fertile, where they are unable to yield the crop that they were once able to yield.”

As with many similar sized infrastructure projects, EACOP brings with it the promise of jobs and economic prosperity for the local area. However, most of the affected community members do not qualify for those jobs. 

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“For those that do," said Mamdoo, “the vast majority [of jobs] will be realised within the construction phase of the pipeline, meaning that they will be incredibly short term and they will force people into conditions of what is effectively modern-day wage slavery, where people earn enough simply to reproduce the labour for the next day, but certainly not enough to meaningfully transform their material conditions.”

It has been well documented that women are disproportionally affected by the effects of climate change. Zimbabwean activist and Coordinator of the Don’t Gas Africa campaign, Lorraine Chiponda, says the same is true of women who are displaced to make way for gas and oil projects. 

“In sub-Saharan Africa, around 60% of communities and grassroot groups depend on land-based activities to survive.” she said. “And a large percentage of this is women, who till the land, who produce food for their family because of our colonial systems that allow men to go to work in the urban areas and leaves women in the rural areas.” 

Women who have been moved by the government to pave way for gas projects in Mozambique, not only didn’t receive much compensation, which was generally paid to the men, but often they had to travel further for daily supplies, leaving less time for paid work and were often exposed to greater risks to their personal safety, according to Chiponda.

On COP28’s decision not to phase-out fossil fuels, Chiponda said: “It will only increase future emissions, leave Africa with stranded assets and perpetuate the same system whereby energy extracted from Africa does not benefit African communities. 

“We need to actively develop a Pan-African narrative whereby transition is about access to energy itself. It's about having democratic processes that allow people to have control and have their voices heard with regard to energy issues and ensuring that the plight of women is made better because of energy access.”

COP29 in 2024 will be held in oil-rich Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan’s economy relies almost entirely on oil and gas, which represents 90% of its exports.

As part of our winter membership drive, we are pulling back the curtain on what we do here at Reasons to be Cheerful. In this story, Contributing Editor Michaela Haas shares her perspective on solutions journalism. This is part one of a three-part series. Click here to read part two. Read part three here. Want to learn more about our membership program? Click here.

At the turn of this century, New York Times reporter Tina Rosenberg had uncovered a massive scandal but couldn’t convince her editor to publish her research: The price for HIV medication had soared. Thousands of patients in the Global South were dying because they could not afford the expensive treatment. “What people didn’t know was that the Clinton administration was colluding with the pharma industry to keep the prices artificially inflated,” the Pulitzer Prize-decorated Rosenberg says. Her editor at the New York Times Magazine agreed that the practice was scandalous but still, he was not willing to “print yet another depressing AIDS story!” 

Rosenberg didn’t give up. Instead, she wrote a feature about a country that defied the pressure, produced the life-saving medication in its own labs and distributed it for free, effectively halving the death rate: Brazil.  

The success of that New York Times cover story, “Look at Brazil,” was phenomenal: The US government changed its policy and the life-saving antiretrovirals became affordable in the global South. “This is exactly the principle,” Rosenberg said at a conference of the Solutions Journalism Network in Sundance, Utah, where I first met her: “Instead of just calling out a problem, we ask: Who does it better?”

Rosenberg suspected that the solutions principle would make sense for other topics, too. “The idea is too good to keep it to ourselves,” her colleague David Bornstein agreed, and in 2013, they co-founded the New York-based Solutions Journalism Network (SJN), which offers training and support for solutions journalism. 

A little over five years ago, SJN retweeted a story of mine about finding post-traumatic growth. I had to look up what the network stood for. On its website, I read its definition of solutions journalism as “rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.” I was instantly hooked. It’s an evidence-driven approach that focuses on reproducible, effective solutions while not shying away from revealing limitations and shortcomings. 

“I honestly don’t think I would still be passionate about my job if I mainly wrote about what’s wrong with the world,” Haas writes. Credit: Gayle M. Landes

Shortly after, I began training in solutions journalism, started writing a solutions column for the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and coordinated a local solutions journalism community in Los Angeles before joining Reasons to be Cheerful as contributing editor in the spring of 2021.

Reasons to be Cheerful is one of only a handful of publications that exclusively publishes true solutions journalism. As a reader, you might have initially come here for the “cheer” in the name, and you might not necessarily have heard of solutions journalism. But if you read us, you know you won’t find cute kitten videos on our site to cheer you up (though there is nothing cuter than kittens). 

Often, solutions journalism isn’t exactly “good” news. “Journalists are not interested in making people feel good,” Bornstein agrees. “In fact, when you look at a lot of solutions journalism, it’s not designed to make people feel better. It’s almost always stories about people who are performing poorly with problems compared to how they could be performing. It makes negligence egregious because there are other options. We think it is the most powerful way to shift journalism because accountability is our number-one job.”

The negativity bias has been well documented, including in one of my favorite books, the bestseller Factfulness by the late Hans Rosling: Readers believe the world is worse than it actually is. “When asked simple questions about global trends ― what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school ― we systematically get the answers wrong,” Rosling and his co-authors find. “So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers.”

No matter which pressing problems I think of, there are always people, communities or institutions who are working to solve them, and it is simply good journalism to research them. Solutions journalism fails when it is naïve and pollyanna-ish, but it does make me feel better to know that we live in a world where smart people who care are looking for solutions.

“If we only ever write about how people fail, it’s no surprise they don’t want to read us anymore,” Bornstein adds. “It makes you feel less helpless to live in a society where people are thinking about doing better.” 

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That’s why I’m convinced that solutions journalism is also a solution for the trust crisis in journalism. According to the latest comprehensive Digital News Report by the Reuters Institute, only four out of ten news consumers say they trust most news most of the time, and more than a third (36 percent) of news consumers say they avoid the news often or sometimes. News avoiders are more likely to say they are interested in solutions-based journalism. 

“Journalism suffered an existential crisis along with its economic crisis, and solutions journalism is a way of responding to that, a way of increasing trust,” Rosenberg says. “People are assuming that trust is a function of accuracy, and we think it’s also a function of people feeling seen and respected by how the media portrays them.” 

Studies show that solutions reporting rarely increases click rates but it increases the reading time by 10 to 20 percent, strengthens credibility and boosts reader engagement. Karen McIntyre, professor for multimedia journalism at the Virginia Commonwealth University, discovered that solutions journalism is also an antidote to feeling helpless and hopeless. 

What began in Bornstein’s one-bedroom New York apartment a decade ago has now become an international network. SJN has trained more than 47,000 journalists in 160 countries, and curates a searchable database with solutions stories from 1,900 news organizations. 

“People want more solutions journalism [with a focus on the climate crisis],” writes Mitali Mukherjee, who co-authored Reuters’ report on climate news use. “And essentially, that means that they’re looking for not just positive stories, but they’re looking for what’s working in a community and what might be replicated in another.”

What I personally appreciate most about this kind of solutions-focused journalism is its impact. I continue to be amazed how the stories change me and the readers.

After I wrote about the pesticide use and labor abuse in the flower industry, I stopped buying red roses for my spouse. 

After I researched an in-depth feature on the climate diet (here’s a piece about the topic by my colleague Peter Yeung), I pivoted to plant-based meals. 

Since I wrote about solutions for the increase in pedestrian deaths in the US, I approach crosswalks much more carefully. 

I am a reporter, not an advocate. I won’t tell you what to make for dinner or who to vote for. But once we have all the facts clearly laid out with compelling evidence, it’s nearly impossible to ignore them.

I know this is the case for you, too, because you tell me so. Since focusing on solutions journalism, I’m getting significantly more mail from readers, and 99 percent of the people who write are genuinely engaged, interested, asking good questions or requesting more information so they can adopt an idea themselves. It’s fascinating and enriching! Very rarely do I get a letter that is insulting, and I believe this is also proof that we have earned your trust.

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Also, it’s just simply more fun and more meaningful for me to interview people who actively tackle climate change/pollution/mental health/biodiversity or any number of issues I care about. “As a journalist who is often disturbed by the sad stories that make the news daily, it comes as a relief to do something different — tell stories of hope that illuminate a gloomy world,” freelance solutions reporter Olayide Oluwafunmilayo Soaga shared on Solutions Journalism Day. 

I have been a reporter since I was 16 years old, writing stories about local politics and art reviews for my local paper after school. I honestly don’t think I would still be passionate about my job if I mainly wrote about what’s wrong with the world.

Also, in the last 20 years, I’ve lived in Europe, Asia and the US. I feel this is an advantage for solutions journalism because I have seen for myself how different countries grapple with problems that other countries have been able to solve. Switzerland has the lowest abortion rate in the world, Sweden recycles more glass (94 percent) than any other country, some countries have found solutions for rising gun deaths. Which means: Your country or community can solve the issue, too.

Bornstein sees solutions journalism as a way of shedding light on what’s possible, and maybe even changing what we see as possible. He quotes the saying that sunlight is the best disinfectant before adding, “Maybe it isn’t enough to shine a light on shortcomings, maybe journalism shouldn’t just play the role of disinfectant, but also photosynthesis.” 

And that is a reason to be cheerful.

The post How I Got Hooked on Solutions Journalism appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

On 5 December 2023 John Kerry, the US climate envoy to COP28 in Dubai, launched an international ‘engagement plan’ to accelerate fusion research. Kerry’s plan involves cooperation between thirty-five countries on ‘R&D, supply chain and marketplace, regulation, workforce, education and engagement’. He presented fusion as a ‘critical piece of our energy future’ with the potential, if it can harness the atom to produce clean energy, to ‘revolutionize our world’.

My bet is that Kerry will be wrong and that fusion power will eventually join cold fusion and trans-warp conduits as neat but failed ideas. But fusion power appears to be a favoured technical fix for an intractable political problem around decarbonisation. We thus need to ask: what kinds of social functions are expectations about fusion performing? Focusing on whether fusion will work can mean we overlook the social management strategy involved in claiming that we should expect it to work. I suggest those social functions are fourfold.

Claims about fusion reify future innovation as a linear progression

Kerry’s marketing pitch for fusion power was that ‘we are edging ever closer to a fusion powered reality’. But consider two recent fusion episodes. Claims about the UK JET fusion reactor in 2021–22 and more generally about the French ITER fusion reactor, both of which use magnetic confinement to confine and heat plasma, were species of science communication hype. Thermal and electric inputs were under-counted and so net power gain was misrepresented. And claims about the US LLNL fusion reactor in 2022, which used inertial laser confinement to compress a fuel capsule, were species of manufactured ignorance. Both the total energy consumed to achieve ignition, and the military purposes of the experiment, were obfuscated.

Yet beyond the general inaccuracy of claims about fusion power, the specific accomplishments of fusion experiments—from demonstrating burning plasma to achieving ignition—have been amplified to frame technological promise as a linear inching forward. The perception of incrementalism is a social management exercise. Kerry’s future-oriented expectations are a technological promise akin to a contract with the future.

Fusion is just thirty years away?

Fusion is thirty years away now and will always be thirty years away, and that disappointment needs to be constantly massaged. Recently a few Japanese analysts performed a regression analysis of fusions researchers’ expectations, published between 1985 and 2022, about when fusion will be ready. They found that expectations are accelerating, or in other words that as we approach the present, fusion researchers expect fusion to arrive sooner—maybe in 17.8 years.

Yet our statistically precise analysts overlooked what is made obvious by the famous song ‘Tomorrow’ from the 1977 musical Annie: ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya tomorrow. You’re always a day away’. Deferring fulfilment of a promise till tomorrow is less about pinging a precise date of success than it is about optimistically smiling through all the disappointments that continually litter yesterday. That is the real-world effect of the ever-present but-always tomorrow. As the economists Stephen Ziliak and Deidre McCloskey wrote in The Cult of Statistical Significance (2008), when trying to grasp ‘significance’ in human affairs, it is oomph (real-world effect), not precision, that matters most.

Expectations are performative

The outcomes of expectations about techno-futures do not hinge solely on whether gadgets come into being as imagined, as if technology determines social order, but ultimately upon organisational and cultural-political factors. In my field of Science and Technology Studies, we argue that technological expectations are therefore performative: they guide activities, provide pathways and political legitimation, attract investments and mobilise resources at various scales (national policy and regulatory design, intermediate public-private innovation networks and local research groups). Crucially, announced expectations about the future will often move from inflating the promise of research to intervening where failure might damage projects and reputations.

Kerry’s COP28 speech adopted a tone of humility regarding failed projections and likely engineering challenges, but also intervened in those past failures to situate them as actually inching towards a clean energy fusion future. He was there, he said, to ‘harness the power of fundamental physics and human ingenuity’, and that was the cue to pivot away from technology and towards people. Referring to visiting the so-called moonshot factory Google X in California, where he ‘listened to the scientists talking excitedly’ about fusion, Kerry also mentioned visiting ‘Commonwealth’.

What is Commonwealth?

Commonwealth Fusions Systems is an MIT startup, co-founded by Dennis Whyte (director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Centre) and designed to ‘leverage’ decades of research at MIT plus the ‘innovation and speed of the private sector’, which is ‘supported by the world’s leading investors in breakthrough energy technologies’. Commonwealth’s pitch is that it is using a new type of superconducting material to build a super-powerful magnet that will be better than ITER: still a tokamak, but stronger, smaller and cheaper. Though of course, this is the fusion power industry, so ‘Commonwealth’s magnet hasn’t been tested in a working reactor’.

The under-construction tokamak room at the Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Cat Clifford, CNBC

Here we have our intervention, where failure might derail a project: Kerry, a former Senator for Massachusetts, spruiking for a public-private fusion startup in Massachusetts. Of course, Kerry was also introducing what is in effect ITER Part Deux, (another) thirty-five nations, this time led by the US in a policy direction—a ‘decadal vision’—announced by the US Office of Science and Technology Policy on 2 December 2023. Future expectations about fusion thus perform a rescue operation on the present, in this instance via a set of commitments to cooperate across several material, economic and political dimensions.

The quest for relevance

Expectations perform the social function of constantly laundering relevance. The ITER project is symbolic of the issue in this regard, because ITER was sold to politicians and to the public via misleading claims about net power gain, and specifically about a tenfold return on energy (Q=10): 500 MW out from 50 MW in. But ITER was only designed for net gain across the plasma, not the entire reactor, and so most estimates of net power gain ignore thermal and electric inputs. Fusion critics like Steven B. Krivit have called this the ‘grand illusion’ of fusion. ITER has now conceded that the net power of ITER will be zero and that its primary goal is to produce a burning plasma. The same deletions of inputs occur when conflating ignition with net power gain in inertial laser confinement experiments.

New future-oriented expectations have the social function of encouraging publics, politicians and investors with limited historical attention spans to not bother recalling failed projections. The British ZETA project (started in 1957) never worked as hoped and ceased operating in 1968, and the UK cancelled the Reversed Field Experiment (magnetic confinement) in 1981. The US scaled back its funding of fusion research from its heyday in the 1970s, with Reagan, Bush and Clinton iteratively cutting funding. One completed reactor, the LLNL Tandem Fusion Mirror Reactor, was never turned on, and eventually dismantled.

Returning to Massachusetts, Commonwealth’s Dennis Whyte had his fusion lab at MIT shut down in 2016, meaning that only computer simulations could be performed, not experiments. Whyte had claimed in 2013 to have designed a fusion reactor that could produce 250 MW of electricity. Commonwealth now claims that it has a great magnet to run a tokamak, that it is much better than ITER, and that by 2025 it will be ‘generating 10 times more energy than it consumes’.

It turns out the ITER myth travels from one fusion reactor to another (this one yet to be tested). Maybe that is the ultimate point about techno-expectations—that they can live fruitful lives without ever having to come true. What matters are not the claims themselves, but what others (hopefully) do with the claims. Fusion edgelords.

Nuclear After-Life: From tragedy to farce, the claims of a nuclear renaissance

Darrin Durant, Mar 2023

Non-hydro renewables have now overtaken nuclear power, with wind and solar alone reaching 10.2 per cent of global gross power generation in 2021.

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The revelation that the COP28 president told former UN human rights commissioner Mary Robinson that he believed there is “no science” to justify a total phase-out of fossil fuels to stay within 1.5C has stoked anger and shock around the world. 

But overwhelmingly this global backlash has come from white environmentalists who fail to realise that the blanket demand to eliminate fossil fuels is widely perceived across the developing world as an ill-conceived and self-serving colonial narrative promoted by Western interests.

The next day, Dr Sultan Al Jaber told a press conference that he believed he had been misinterpreted, and that both a “phase down and phase out of fossil fuels is inevitable”. This has not stemmed the backlash, but it has revealed a fatal failure at the heart of the Western environment movement.

Poverty Blindness

For too many in the developing world, basic infrastructure for transport, health and food barely exists. Many of these countries have only just begun developing their own natural resources, including fossil fuels, to rise out of poverty and become independent. 

For them, the clarion call from Western environmentalists for phasing out fossil fuels sends a very different message – it says that these countries must not be allowed to use their own natural resources to pursue sovereignty, fight poverty, feed their families, build new cities and opportunities, and strive for a good life. 

They fear that ‘green colonialism’ will force them to stop relying on their own oil and gas and end up dependent – once again – on Western investors, expertise and technology, who will end up reaping the benefits of an energy transition away from fossil fuels. 

Here at the COP28 summit in Dubai, I’ve been working with delegates from a range of developing nations – the Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Chad, Mali, and Malaysia to name just a few. Overwhelmingly, they tell me that the fundamental problem with the fossil fuel phase-out call is that, for them, it’s meaningless. 

How can 200 countries sign up to phase out fossil fuels – including 98 oil producers (half of whom are in the developing world) – when there is no accompanying agreement on: 

• a 100% plan for a completely new energy system for every one of these near 200 countries – because the deployment for every country will be unique and specific to its composition and need; 
• a clear build-out transition plan on deployment, logistics, costs, and distribution for each of these countries; 
• a ‘just transition’ strategy to allow industries and workers to pivot, all along a transparent timeline for every one of these 200 countries, especially for those developing nations whose economic prosperity is symbiotically dependent on oil exports, or chronically addicted to oil imports (such as my own country of origin, Bangladesh)?
• a ‘just transition’ strategy that ensures critical minerals and raw materials extraction from developing nations is done in a circular economy model that protects workers.
• an investment structure that for all these countries ensures that huge volumes investment in the transition flowing in do not result in the extraction of profits and resources for the predominant benefit of Western companies, but is distributed with and benefits local communities. 

‘The BBC’s Claim About COP28 Secret Oil Deals Is Deeply Flawed’

The job of journalism is not to reinforce a pre-existing bias, writes Nafeez Ahmed

Nafeez Ahmed
Climate Danger

There can be no doubt that the climate science makes clear that carbon dioxide from exponentially increasing fossil fuel production is driving us into the climate danger zone – perhaps long before the 1.5C ‘safe limit’ agreed at Paris. 

In 2021, I was the lead contributing editor of Rethinking Climate Change by RethinkX, a major study exploring how scaling up key technology disruptions in energy, transport and food could potentially reduce emissions by 90% by 2035. But one of our most alarming findings was that in every scenario we modelled, it was impossible to avoid breaching the 1.5℃ safe limit even with the speed and scale of these disruptions.

Several scientific studies have concluded that there is no pathway to staying within 1.5℃. One recent paper in Nature Climate Change found a two-thirds chance of exceeding the 1.5℃ climate safety threshold after 2030.

But a paper published in the Climate Risk Management journal went further, concluding that “dangerous climate target overshoot is almost inevitable”. The only way to now mitigate this is to stop carbon emissions as soon as possible, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and deploy technologies “for rapidly cooling global temperatures”.

What this means, however, is that to claim that there’s a scientific pathway to staying within 1.5℃  just by phasing out fossil fuels is highly questionable. 

Phase Down or Phase Out?

So here we need to not only stop new emissions as soon as possible but somehow begin rapidly drawing down carbon from the atmosphere. That much the scientific community agrees on. The question, of course, is how. 

While the climate scientists who call for a fossil fuel phase-out might well be able to justify the idea in terms of a general goal – what they have failed entirely to do is to produce a viable and concrete plan to actually make this happen. I don’t mean yet another technical report showing we can build a 100% renewable energy system. We need a comprehensive, region-by-region, country-by-country, roadmap.

To that extent, it’s simply not enough to demand a fossil fuel phase out. We need a scientifically and technically rigorous practical plan. 

200 countries will not sign up to a phase-out agreement if they can’t see how it will work – and many of them see it as an even more immediate existential threat than climate change. Repeating slogans won’t make it happen. Doing the work to ensure every country can envision concrete post-carbon alternatives is what we need to focus on – and is what the environment movement so far has still failed to do.

EXCLUSIVE

The Great Contraction: How the End of Cheap Money and Energy Will Degrade or Renew Civilisation

Nafeez Ahmed predicted the 2008 financial crash. But it was not resolved and has led to a more profound crisis which will require a major restructuring of the global economy to survive

Nafeez Ahmed
The Risk of Colonial Control

Several COP28 delegates from Nigeria and Chad, two oil-producing countries in Africa, told me that Sultan Al Jaber’s caution around a fossil fuel phase-out is welcome. One, Dayo Israel is a veteran COP delegate for 20 years who is head of the youth wing of Nigeria’s largest political party, and one of the COP28 delegates I’m working with here in Dubai. He told me that he found the recent media coverage astonishing:

“Climate change is ravaging countries in Africa. But before we are even thinking about climate change, we are thinking about how we can feed ourselves, how we can get a job. Nigeria is using our own resources to try to develop new infrastructure so that we can live better lives. But come to Lagos, and you’ll see that it’s the only place with a basic metro. The rest of the country has barely a transport infrastructure. We have only recently begun to try to build up our country by standing on our own feet, using our own resources. Now we are being told we must become dependent on the West again! Why should Nigerians and Africans be denied our aspirations to meet our basic needs, let alone to attain prosperity on a scale that Westerners take for granted? You can talk about phase out all you like. But if you don’t give us the tools and funds to do it, it’s really just another Western colonial control narrative.”

For countries in the developing world which are dependent on oil imports, it’s a different fear.

Bangladesh, for instance, where I delivered systems thinking training to civil society activists last summer, is 99% dependent on fossil fuel imports. Speaking to Bangladeshi climate activists was eye-opening.

For them, while they urgently want fossil fuel use to disappear to avert the increasingly devastating impacts that are afflicting Bangladesh more than most places in the world, they worried about the justice of such a transition. Several activists I spoke to told me that a global climate deal which focuses on a total fossil fuel phase-out, without committing to the energy system that will replace it, will not be welcomed by Bangladeshis, but instead seen as a disaster waiting to happen.

The country, one of the most vulnerable in the world to climate change, has made scant progress on renewable energy – if the country is unable to import oil and gas in this scenario, it would plunge into catastrophe. ‘Back into caves’ would be an understatement. As such, signing up to such an agreement would feel like a suicide pact.

Some climate activists have overlooked the complex interlinkages between this issue. Whatever one thinks of Sultan Al Jaber, one statement he’s made repeatedly makes perfect sense: “We cannot unplug the world from the current energy system before we build a new energy system.”

The focus, then, has to shift. Instead of focusing on dismantling the incumbent system, we need to focus on accelerating the deployment of the new system that will replace it (both in terms of technological transformations across key sectors, as well as related socio-economic transformations): because that’s the only way that demand for oil and gas can be eliminated.

Ultimately, the conversation needs to change to how we phase out fossil fuel demand. Because it’s demand that keeps producers in business. That, of course, shifts the locus of responsibility for action, and brings up the stark necessity of accelerating two things: the deployment of the specific technologies that have the biggest bang for the buck in terms of slashing emissions, and the social changes we need to optimise and adapt our societies to distribute the benefits of this transformation. 

And that’s why a viable global climate agreement has to not just talk about a phase out, phase down, or whatever term we might want to use to describe it; it has to ensure that it makes available the trillions of dollars worth of climate financing that will be necessary for this transformation to actually take place at pace in the developing world – and in a way that’s structured properly to uplift, not exploit, developing nations. 

EXCLUSIVE

Trump and Putin’s War on the ‘Green Agenda’

Nafeez Ahmed reveals how the Russian energy giant Gazprom planned to control Ukraine’s gas and backed Donald Trump due to Putin’s existential fear of net zero

Nafeez Ahmed
The Most Ambitious, and Most Precarious COP?

So far, the COP28 negotiations have exposed deep-seated global divisions that could easily derail some of the most ambitious climate action goals tabled by the Presidency. If the polarisation around the phase-out/phase-down issue becomes too toxic, it could leave the final draft agreement in tatters. 

Yet we have to not lose sight of the opportunity ahead. We have a chance to get a global agreement on some unprecedented milestones that have never been on the table before: tripling renewables worldwide by 2030, reducing fossil fuel use worldwide, and releasing trillions of climate finance. 

What many don’t realise is that we are dealing with nonlinear dynamics here – not simple straight line change. 

Tripling renewables would lead solar, wind and battery costs – already more competitive than fossil fuels in most regions of the world – to plummet by 50% by 2030. That, in turn, would increase their competitiveness which would dramatically accelerate their deployment far beyond the tripling target. 

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That target fits well with the recognition of a phase-down of fossil fuels (as opposed to a phase-out) because it would, in itself, lead to a huge chunk of global fossil fuel demand being extinguished by 2030. As the fossil fuel system is already dependent on multi-trillion dollar direct and indirect subsidies to remain profitable, however, a large dent in demand will strike an economic blow to these incumbent industries, driving many companies to extinction, and incentivising investors to flee new fossil fuel investments. 

Both these dynamics, together, would dramatically amplify both the phase-out of fossil fuels, and the phase-up of the new system. As the fossil fuel system enters accelerated decline, the emerging clean energy system will experience accelerated deployment. 

So, if implemented, such an agreement would be critical to accelerating the global system transformation we need by shifting energy markets into a new gear under the realisation that the demise of the age of oil is, indeed, inevitable. If we fail to get this agreement, the world will have taken a step backwards leaving all of us vulnerable to higher risks of breaching tipping points that could catapult us into increasingly dangerous climate chaos.