The two words that pushed international climate talks into overtime

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The annual UN climate negotiations at COP28 in Dubai have officially come to a close. Delegates scrambled to get a deal together in the early morning hours, and the meetings ended a day past their scheduled conclusion (as these things tend to). 

If you’ve tuned out news from the summit, I don’t really blame you. The quibbles over wording—“urges” vs. “notes” vs. “emphasizes”—can all start to sound like noise. But these talks are the biggest climate event of the year, and there are some details that are worth paying attention to. 

We’ve seen agreements on methane and renewables, and big progress on an international finance deal. And, of course, there was the high-profile fight about fossil fuels. As negotiators wrap up and start their treks home, let’s take a beat to sort through what happened at COP28 and why all these political fights matter for climate action.

What’s the point of these meetings anyway? 

The UN Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings are an annual chance for negotiators from nearly 200 nations to set goals and make plans to address climate change. 

You might be familiar with the outcome of one of these meetings: eight years ago COP21 gave us the Paris Agreement, the international treaty that set a goal to limit global warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) over preindustrial levels.

This year’s meeting comes at a crucial time for the Paris Agreement. Part of that treaty requires the world to put together a progress report on climate change, called the global stocktake. It’s supposed to happen every five years, and the first one was scheduled to finish up at this year’s COP. 

What were the big agreements from the meetings? 

1. On the first day of the talks, there was a big announcement about a loss and damage fund. This is money that richer nations put into a pool to help pay for damages caused by climate change in more vulnerable nations. 

You may remember that the creation of this fund was a major topic at last year’s COP27 in Egypt. The urgency was spurred by a collection of climate disasters, including particularly devastating floods in Pakistan in August 2022. 

Now there’s some money going into the account: at least $700 million pledged by wealthy nations.

There are some caveats, of course. The agreement is still short on details, missing anything like financial targets or rules about how nations will put money in. In fact, there’s currently no requirement for wealthy nations to contribute at all, and the pledged money is a fraction of what many scientists say is really needed to pay for the damage caused by climate change. (Some estimates put that number at $100 billion annually.)

2. Over 100 countries pledged to triple renewable energy capacity and double energy efficiency by 2030. In addition, the US and 20 other countries signed a pledge to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050. 

3. Finally, 50 oil and gas companies pledged to virtually eliminate methane leaks from their operations by 2030. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, and plugging up accidental leaks from oil and gas production is seen as an easy way to cut climate pollution. 

The companies that signed this pledge, which included ExxonMobil and Saudi Aramco, represent 40% of global production. 

Some analysts have pointed out that the pledge will have a pretty limited effect. Most human-caused methane emissions come from agriculture, after all. And accidental methane emissions aren’t the biggest problem fossil-fuel companies cause, by a long shot. The majority of emissions from fossil-fuel companies isn’t from their operations but from their products.

What was holding things up? 

In two words: fossil fuels. 

I wrote in the newsletter a couple of weeks ago about how fossil fuels were going to loom large over these talks, not least because they’re being hosted in the UAE, a nation whose wealth relies heavily on them. The leader of the talks (and head of the UAE’s national oil company) has lived up to that prediction, questioning the scientific reasoning behind the calls to eliminate fossil fuels. 

As delegates worked to put the final agreement together, a sticking point in the debate was how fossil fuels would be represented. Earlier versions of the draft text called for phasing them out. But many nations, including the UAE, objected to this sort of language. And these meetings run by consensus: everybody has to sign off on the final agreement. 

So in the final version, the language was watered down. The pivotal paragraph now calls on parties to take a series of actions, including “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.”  

In a way, this bit is a win, since it’s the first COP agreement that even mentions fossil fuels by name. (The bar is truly on the floor.) 

Ultimately, the exact wording of a COP agreement probably won’t be the thing to spur anybody into real action. Rather, the state of the world’s attitude toward climate change is reflected in this agreement: there’s a growing acknowledgement that something needs to change in our relationship with fossil fuels. But there’s not a wide enough consensus yet on the speed of that change, or what that relationship should look like as we pursue ambitious climate goals. 

Maybe next year. 

Another thing

The carbon removal industry is starting to take off, but some experts are warning that it’s headed in the wrong direction. 

There’s a growing signal that the world may have to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to limit global warming. But in a new essay, two former US Department of Energy staffers argue that the emergence of a for-profit sector could actually spell danger for the technology’s ability to help meaningfully address climate change. 

Get all the details in the latest story from my colleague James Temple.

Keeping up with climate  

Silicon powder could be the key to longer EV range and faster charging. Battery giant Panasonic will use silicon material from US-based startup Sila to build new EV batteries. (Wired)

→ Sila’s material debuted in a much smaller product in 2021. (MIT Technology Review)

Not the potatoes! Heavy rains have been bad news for European potato harvesting, sending prices soaring. Thanks, climate change. (Bloomberg)

Repairing EV batteries can be dangerous and difficult. But some mechanics want to do it anyway to save customers money and keep older EVs on the roads. (Grist)

This startup wants to sprinkle rock dust over farmland for carbon removal. (Wired)

Public (non-Tesla) EV chargers in the US can be unreliable, to put it lightly. Here’s how $7.5 billion in federal funding aims to change that. (Canary Media) 

Two- and three-wheelers are going electric in nations across Asia and Africa. And these small vehicles are having a big impact, making up the majority of reduction in oil demand as transportation goes electric. (New York Times)

→ Gogoro is building a massive network of battery-swappable electric scooters. (MIT Technology Review)

Animal agriculture is a big contributor to climate change, but convincing meat eaters to cut back isn’t easy. If you want to get more people to eat plant-based foods, don’t call them “plant-based.” Much less “vegan.” (Washington Post)

There was one permitted offshore wind farm in progress in the US Great Lakes. Now, the project is on hold. (Inside Climate News)

How carbon removal technology is like a time machine

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

If you could go back in time, what would you change about your life, or the world?

The idea of giving myself some much-needed advice is appealing (don’t cut your own bangs in high school, seriously). But we can think bigger. What about winding the clock back on the emissions that cause climate change? 

By burning fossil fuels, we’ve released greenhouse gases by the gigaton. There’s a lot we can (and need to) do to slow and eventually stop these planet-warming emissions. But carbon removal technology has a different promise: turning the clock back. 

Well, sort of. Carbon removal can’t literally take us back in time. But this time-machine analogy for thinking about carbon removal—specifically when it comes to the scale that will be needed to make a significant dent in our emissions—is a favorite of climate scientist David Ho, who I spoke to for my latest story. So for the newsletter this week, let’s consider what it might take for carbon removal to take us back far enough in time to reverse our mistakes (emissions-related ones, anyway). 

The world is on track to hit a new record for carbon dioxide emissions due to fossil fuels, with the global total expected to reach 36.8 billion metric tons this year, according to the newest edition of the Global Carbon Budget Report.

For the first time this year, the report included another total: how much carbon dioxide was sucked out of the atmosphere by carbon removal technologies. In 2023, carbon removal is expected to total around 10,000 metric tons. 

That’s obviously a lot less, but exactly how much less can be hard to grasp, as Ho points out. “I think humans (myself included) have a hard time with orders of magnitude, like the difference between thousands, millions, and billions,” he told me in an email. 

One solution Ho has come up with is putting things in terms of time. It’s something we intuitively have a handle on, which can make big numbers easier to understand. A thousand seconds is around 17 minutes. A million seconds is about 11 days. A billion seconds is nearly 32 years. 

Since time is a bit easier to grasp, when Ho talks about carbon removal, he often invokes the idea of a time machine. “My goal is to help people appreciate the scale of the problem, and put ‘solutions’ into context,” he says. 

Imagine all carbon removal technology as one big time machine, winding the clock back on emissions. If the world is emitting just under 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in a year, how far back in time could this year’s total carbon removal take us? Right now, the answer is somewhere around 10 seconds. 

We eventually need to reach net-zero emissions if we’re going to avoid the worst effects of climate change. And it’s pretty clear that 10 seconds is a pretty far cry from being enough to zero out a year’s worth of emissions. There are two things we’d need to do for this time machine to be more effective: scale up carbon removal technology, and drastically scale back emissions. 

It’ll take time, and likely a lot of it, to get carbon removal technology to a point where it’s a more effective time machine. There are technical, logistical, and economic challenges to figure out. And early projects, like the Climeworks direct-air-capture plant in Iceland, are still getting their footing.

“It’s going to take many years to make significant progress, so we should start now,” Ho says. And while we figure all that out, it’s a good time to focus on decarbonization, he adds. Slashing our emissions is possible with tools we already have on the table. Doing so will make it a bit more feasible for carbon removal technologies to eventually play a significant role in cleaning up our emissions. 

If you’re curious to learn more, including how big a dent larger projects might make, check out David Ho’s article from earlier this year in Nature. You can also take a look back at some of our recent coverage of carbon removal below. 

Related reading

Carbon removal tech is vacuuming up significantly less than one-millionth of our fossil-fuel emissions. Get all the details in my latest story.

Startup Climeworks has been one of the major actors in putting direct air capture on the map. We put the company on our list of 15 businesses to watch in climate tech this year.

The US Department of Energy is committing big money to carbon removal. Earlier this year, the agency announced over $1 billion in funding for the technology, as my colleague James Temple covered.

Another thing

Around a decade ago, a huge wave of startups working on energy and climate-related technologies failed. This surge and crash in what’s often called cleantech 1.0 holds many lessons for innovators today. 

Now, as interest and funding in climate and energy technology companies again is surging, what should we take away from the previous generation of startups? My colleague David Rotman took a careful look for his latest story. Give it a read!

Keeping up with climate  

The University of California system is basically done with carbon offsets. While paying to balance out your own emissions sounds like a good deal, there are a host of problems with the practice. (MIT Technology Review)

Generating an image using AI can require as much energy as fully charging a smartphone. Smaller models doing other tasks (like generating text) can be significantly less energy intensive. (MIT Technology Review)

COP28 is in full swing. Here’s a quick roundup of a few of the headlines that have caught my eye so far. (If you need a catch-up on what’s happening at the UN climate talks and why fossil fuels are center stage, check out my story from last week here.) 

• The head of the conference has been criticized for his comments about fossil fuels. (Vox)
• Over 20 countries pledged to triple the world’s nuclear energy by 2050. (Canary Media)
• Nations committed over $400 million in funding to help vulnerable nations pay for climate damages. These are the first pledges to the loss and damage fund, created at last year’s talks. (NPR)

A rule change in California slashed the value of rooftop solar panels six months ago. New sales are (predictably) down since the change. (Canary Media)

The Salton Sea is a salt lake in California. It contains a fascinating ecosystem, and apparently a whole lot of lithium. There might be 18 million metric tons of the metal under the main lake, the equivalent of nearly 400 million EV batteries. (LA Times) 

Congress set aside $7.5 billion for EV chargers. But there hasn’t been a single one installed with the money yet. (Politico) 

Fossil-fuel emissions are over a million times greater than carbon removal efforts

Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are on track to reach a record high by the end of 2023. And a new report shows just how insignificant technologies that pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere are by comparison. 

Worldwide, those emissions are projected to reach 36.8 billion metric tons in 2023, a 1.1% increase from 2022 levels, according to this year’s Global Carbon Budget Report, released today. As delegates gather in Dubai for this year’s UN climate summit, a record-setting year for emissions underscores the need to make dramatic changes, and quickly. 

“There has been great progress in reducing emissions in some countries—however, it just isn’t good enough. We’re drastically off course,” Mike O’Sullivan, a lecturer at the University of Exeter and one of the authors of the report, said via email. 

Europe’s emissions dropped around 7% from last year, while the US saw a 3% reduction. But overall, coal, oil, and natural-gas emissions are all still on the rise, and nations including India and China are still seeing emissions growth. Together, those two nations currently account for nearly 40% of global fossil-fuel emissions, though Western nations including the US are still the greatest historical emitters.

“What we want to see is fossil-fuel emissions decreasing, fast,” said David Ho, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a science advisor at Carbon Direct, a carbon management company, via email. 

However, one technology sometimes touted as a cure-all for the emissions problems has severe limitations, according to the new report: carbon dioxide removal. Carbon removal technologies suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere to prevent them from further warming the planet. The UN panel on climate change has called carbon removal an essential component of plans to reach international climate targets of keeping warming at less than 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above preindustrial levels. 

The problem is, there’s very little carbon dioxide removal taking place today. Direct air capture and other technological approaches collected and stored only around 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2023. 

That means that, in total, emissions from fossil fuels were millions of times higher than carbon removal levels this year. That ratio shows that it’s “infeasible” for carbon removal technologies to balance out emissions, O’Sullivan says: “We cannot offset our way out of this problem.”

The report also had bad news about nature-based approaches. Efforts to pull carbon out of the atmosphere with methods like reforestation and afforestation (in other words, planting trees) accounted for more emissions removed from the atmosphere than their technological counterparts. However, even those efforts are still being canceled out by current rates of deforestation and other land-use changes.

“The only way to solve this crisis is with major changes to the fossil-fuel industry,” O’Sullivan says. Technologies like carbon removal “only become important if emissions are drastically cut as well.”

There are many tools available to start making more progress on emissions in the near term, as a UN climate report released earlier this year laid out: deploying renewables like wind and solar, preventing deforestation and cutting methane leaks, and increasing energy efficiency are all among the low-cost solutions that could cut emissions in half by 2030.  

Ultimately, carbon removal could also be part of the answer, but there’s a lot of work left to do, Ho says. Now is a good time to study and develop carbon removal technologies, figure out the risks and benefits of different approaches, and determine which ones can be scaled up while avoiding ecological and environmental-justice issues, he adds. 

None of that is likely to happen fast enough to achieve the progress needed on emissions cuts this decade. In the Global Carbon Budget report, researchers estimate how close we are to sailing past climate limits. The researchers estimate that there’s about 275 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide left to emit before we exceed 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) of warming. At this rate, the world is on track to blow that budget within about seven years, around the end of the decade. 

“We have agency, and nothing is inevitable,” O’Sullivan says. “The world will change and is changing—we just need to speed up.”