<img alt="Chris Bowen, Australia’s climate change and energy minister, speaks at the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai” src=”https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d58c1b9cc07c96631dbab2cb1cd9e497e1299b32/611_1168_5301_3181/master/5301.jpg?width=465&dpr=1&s=none” width=”465″ height=”279.03508771929825″ class=”dcr-evn1e9″>
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.
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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…
2023-12-11 04:50:08
Article from www.theguardian.com
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