The World Has a New Floor for Climate Ambition

This morning in Dubai, after a long night of consultations, the world struck a deal that will guide countries’ commitments to fixing climate change. For the first time in the nearly 30 years of the Conference of Parties, a COP document managed to directly address reducing fossil fuels. The text “calls on parties” to transition “away from fossil fuels in energy systems.”  

The deal still leaves significant allowances for fossil fuels to linger into the future, and includes language recognizing the utility of “transitional fuels,” which is code for natural gas, and “abatement,” which is code for carbon capture and storage, widely considered too expensive and unproven to be a meaningful solution. Still, it manages, however subtly, to “loosen the industry’s grip” on COP’s outcome, former Vice President Al Gore, who had railed against an earlier version of the text, said in a statement. After bringing down the gavel, Sultan Al Jaber, the head of the United Arab Emirates’ national oil