Chris Bowen’s bid to redraft ‘death certificate’ COP28 statement after Saudi fuel block
Chris Bowen tells COP28 president Sultan al-Jaber that the umbrella group he chaired wouldn’t sign up to the planned conference declaration.
Australia joined other leading nations in marathon meetings pressing for an urgent redrafting of a “death certificate” COP28 text that waters down fossil fuel cuts, in a last-minute rescue bid of the UN climate summit.
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen told COP28 president Sultan al-Jaber that he and other countries of the umbrella group he chaired – the US, Britain, New Zealand, Norway, Israel, Ukraine and Kazakhstan – wouldn’t sign up to the planned conference declaration.
“My friend Cedric Schuster, the Samoan minister, said tonight of this draft that we will not sign our death certificates,” Mr Bowen said. “That’s what’s at stake for many countries that are represented here tonight, and many people who do not have a voice. We will not be a cosignatory to those death certificates.”
After Mr Bowen and other’s protests, a COP28 spokesman confirmed late on Tuesday night (AEDT) that work on a new draft was in process.
The draft text, issued under the presidency of Sultan Jaber, the chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, backs the position of OPEC countries like Saudi Arabia and has attracted heavy criticism from a significant number of Western and small island nation countries that are vulnerable to rising sea levels.
The draft text dropped the phasing down of oil and gas, despite many nations supporting the move in order to keep the world on track to limit global warming to 1.5C. Instead, the draft text had been diluted with vague calls to action amid loose time lines, referring to “actions countries could take” to reduce fossil fuel emissions.
It also mentions consumption and production of fossil fuels, for the first time at a COP, but the wording is fuzzy.
Marshall Islands minister John Silk has spoken about his country’s ‘watery graves’’ if this COP28 didn’t deliver a phasing out of oil, gas and coal.
Mr Bowen was having a series of meetings with the Europeans and Americans, and behind closed doors there was lobbying of China and India to agree to a different wording of the declaration as the conference overran from its planned Tuesday finale.
Australia’s position at this conference is to phase out unabated fossil fuels. Mr Bowen said he could support a change in the wording if it called for “a transition away from fossil fuels in keeping with the science”, but that the 1.5C limit was not up for compromise.
Climate activists insist that Australia, as the third-largest exporter of fossil fuels, will be barely challenged around the new expansion of gas fields or increase production of oil production if the draft text is not changed and adopted into the final declaration
The reference to the science is taken to mean the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has argued for a rapid phase out of fossil fuels but the draft is worded vaguely enough to be an “out clause” for countries that want to resist such action.
Mr Bowen had been arguing to the COP that using abatement technologies to reduce fossil fuels was a “backstop goalkeeper”, but others considered the unproven technology as a caveat to delay the phasing out of oil and gas.
Climate Analytics chief executive Bill Hare said the draft declaration in its current form was a “mess and it was giving fossil fuel exporters a green light to expand their production”.
Greenpeace labelled it a “dog’s dinner”.
A new draft was being prepared, and given the deep divisions over fossil fuels at this conference, the position of China – the world’s biggest emitter of carbon – will be crucial.
Chinese climate envoy Xie Zhenhua told reporters earlier in the week that the energy transition “requires a period of pain”, but said “each country has different national conditions”.
