“Fossil Fuel Producers and Green Energy Advocates”

“Global Battle Royale at COP30 between Fossil Fuel Producers and Green Energy Advocates,” Informed Comment

– Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) . . .

Fiona Harvey at The Guardian reports from the COP30 climate conference that a bloc comprising such countries as India, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt and Bolivia (under its new right-wing President Rodrigo Paz), calling themselves “like-minded developing countries,” are attempting to deep-six the pledge made at COP28 in Dubai to “transition away from fossil fuels.” They do not want any joint statement made at Belém in Brazil to contain that language.

This bloc is a combination of poor countries seeking to avoid any caps on growth and major fossil fuel producers. India and China are major coal producers, Saudi Arabia and Iran are major exporters of petroleum, and Bolivia is an exporter of fossil gas. Egypt is in the former category. India is driven by both considerations. Although many of these fossil fuel producers and users are in the global south, they are backed by northern countries such as Russia.

I note with dismay that several Middle Eastern countries are the bad guys here.

The phraseology to which they object was in a proposed draft saying that countries should “develop just, orderly and equitable transition roadmaps, including to progressively overcome their dependency on fossil fuels and towards halting and reversing deforestation.”

On the other hand, Harvey says many environmentally conscious countries won’t sign a statement that lacks this language.

That is, the retrograde states are in conflict with another bloc, led by Western European countries and by islands threatened by rising seas, who generally lack much in the way of fossil fuels and who fear the catastrophic effects of climate disasters. This bloc, too, is a mixture of global south and global north countries.

The battle royale between the two may prevent COP30, hosted by Brazil, from issuing any joint communiqué or “cover letter.” COP stands for “Conference of Parties” to the Kyoto Climate Accord, which began being negotiated in 1995.

Jayashree Nandi at the Hindustan Times reports that a member of the Indian delegation opined, “Every country has a right to grow. National circumstances and common but differentiated responsibilities are the cornerstones of the Paris Agreement. Those have to be followed.”

Actually, the 2015 Paris Climate Accord demands that countries rejigger their power grids and other fuel uses to ensure that global heating remains under 1.5º C. (2.7º F.) above the preindustrial average. We are already at 1.3º C., and will likely blow past the 1.5º C. limit in the next few years. Climate scientists are afraid that heating the planet more than that will turn the climate system chaotic, so that we will experience not just climate disasters but weird, unpredictable and catastrophic weather phenomena on a regular basis.

If we don’t want that outcome, we have to limit the use of fossil fuels. I genuinely can’t understand the Indian position. Solar panels in India produce electricity more cheaply than coal, so why not just replace the one with the other? India doesn’t have much petroleum, so it would save billions of dollars in oil imports if it quickly electrified transport. There is a costly initial outlay, to be sure, but such green investments would save enormous amounts of money over the coming decades and might keep parts of India from becoming uninhabitable. A quick green transition would not limit Indian development but accelerate it. India has some excellent green energy goals and has made substantial progress, and now is not the time to slack off.

Indian politicians say, not without some justice, that advanced industrial countries that put most of the CO2 up in the atmosphere over the past 200 years, and got rich doing it, ought to help out with cost of the green energy transition and with adaptation to climate change in their former colonies and other countries of the global south. This principle is enshrined in Article 9.1 of the 2015 Paris Climate Treaty.

The same Western European countries that are demanding a reaffirmation of the goal of ending fossil fuels by 2050 don’t want to hear anything more about their responsibility to help fund the green energy transition or climate resiliency in the global south.

Nandi quotes Indians who observe that none of the developed states who want a roadmap to ending fossil fuels, such as France, the UK, Germany and Spain, are on track to meet their 2030 carbon reduction goals, implying that it is hypocritical for them to make this demand of developing countries that feel they have to burn fossil fuels to grow economically.

Nandi reports that “[Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change Bhupender] Yadav cited the 2025 Adaptation Gap Report, which estimates that developing countries will need between $310 billion and $365 billion annually by 2035, while current flows are around $26 billion only.”

I don’t think Yadav’s figures take into account the massive savings from going to green energy. Many developing countries spend 25% of their GDP importing fossil fuels, money that could be freed up for investment in climate resiliency if they put in solar panels and wind turbines and EVs instead.

In the absence of the United States, which Trump wants to keep a fossil fuel hog, there isn’t strong leadership at this COP. Host-country Brazil has a largely low-carbon economy and could play that role, but Brazilian President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva and the Brazilian political elite of both left and right have their eyes on oil and gas development, including offshore Atlantic petroleum deposits that they hope to exploit, and so generally don’t speak categorically for quickly phasing out fossil fuels. It is in my view a pipe dream — deep water petroleum drilling is expensive, and the world’s automobile and truck fleets are rapidly being electrified, so that petroleum’s value will dwindle more quickly than new hard-to-reach deep sea fields can be brought on line.

China is the world’s leading developer and implementer of green energy, but it still gets nearly half its electricity from coal, and apparently the Communist Party does not want to alienate the millions of workers in the coal industry and its ancillary industries. With America out of the game, China is not stepping up as the global leader on the energy transition but rather using Trump’s insouciance as an excuse to slack off.

COP30 may be the nail in the coffin of the global commitment quickly to phase out fossil fuels, and it may also be the conference where exceeding the 1.5º limit became inevitable.