A coalition of eighteen countries led by the Marshall Islands demanded on Friday “an urgent exit from fossil fuels” And “a peak in greenhouse gases by 2025at the end of a climate summit in Brussels five months before COP28. “We must accelerate the global energy transition away from fossil fuels“, stated objective of the G7, and “we must reach the peak of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 at the latest“says the text signed by ministers representing Germany, France, Senegal, Colombia and several island states. “This requires systemic transformations across all sectors, driven by an urgent exit from fossil fuels, beginning with a rapid decline in their production and use in this decade.they write in a final declaration of the 7th Ministerial Summit for Climate Action (MoCA) in Brussels.
These assertions draw in hollow the lines of negotiations which clash in the preparations for the UN climate conference in Dubai, where humanity must agree on the means to save the objective in danger of the agreement of Paris: contain global warming “well below 2°C» compared to the pre-industrial period and if possible at 1.5°C. “We need to phase out unabated fossil fuels long before 2050“, that is to say not backed by carbon capture or storage devices, said Tuesday the European Commissioner for the Environment Frans Timmermans, also a signatory of this declaration, during a speech in Spain. What is meant by the English term “unabated» promises to be fiercely debated between now and COP28 and the eighteen ministers warn: «Emission reduction and depollution technologies (“abatement technologies”) in English) should not be used as a green light for the continued expansion of fossil fuels (…) and should be recognized as having only a minimal role to play in decarbonization” Energy.
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Thursday in Brussels, the Emirati president of COP28 Sultan al-Jaber presented his plan to hope to obtain an ambitious agreement in Dubai on the acceleration of the energy transition, without however deciding on a temporal objective for the exit from fossil fuels. “I don’t have a magic wand, I don’t want to invent dates that are not justifiedlack of sufficient development of low-carbon energies to meet global growth, he said in an interview with AFP. Among the concrete targets he proposed: triple the capacity of renewables in the world by 2030, to 11,000 gigawatts, double the improvement in energy efficiency by 2030 and double the production of hydrogen to 180 million tonnes by 2030.
