A draft negotiating text released Tuesday morning UAE time shows that such a phaseout is indeed being considered by countries currently haggling over what the final, codified takeaways from the stocktake will be. “An orderly and just phase out of fossil fuels” is listed as “Option 1.” Option 2 calls for accelerating “efforts towards phasing out unabated fossil fuels and to rapidly reducing their use so as to achieve net-zero CO2 in energy systems by or around mid-century.” Option 3 is to include no text along these lines at all. The other proposed action items—e.g., phasing out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies and increasing the deployment of zero-emission vehicles—are structured similarly, with one option calling for some kind of action in that category and another calling for nothing at all.
On some level, the Paris Agreement has always been about pledges. Inspired largely by America’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocols—an earlier, binding climate pact—the Paris Agreement was structured as an accumulation of voluntary and periodically updated commitments by each country that signed onto it, known as “nationally determined contributions.” That voluntary, “bottom-up” structure meant that a new pact wouldn’t need to be ratified by the U.S. Senate, which unanimously resolved in 1997 never to ratify a binding climate treaty if it would harm the U.S. economically or if it wasn’t sufficiently strict for developing countries. The United Nations, moreover—out of which the Paris Agreement grew—lacks the kind of enforcement power enjoyed by nation-states and their regulatory regimes, and the financial might of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
But in the past two years, headline-grabbing pledge announcements made outside of the formal United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process have gotten bigger and goofier—exactly as you might expect from a conference that features a talk on “responsible yachting.” The COP announcement game kicked into high gear at the climate talks held in Glasgow in 2021, which the U.K. presidency organized into thematic days (i.e., “Finance Day,” “Youth Day”) intended to draw out flashy pledges from governments, corporations, and NGOs and spur positive news coverage. Some of the high-profile commitments from that conference (COP26) have fallen apart in the intervening years. The much-heralded Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net-Zero—meant to rally banks, asset managers, and insurance companies behind the cause of climate action—waned in influence once membership terms were set, and after oil and gas prices began to rise from their pandemic depths.