World agrees to 'transition away' from fossil fuels
A UN summit in Dubai reached a first-ever call to move away from the coal, oil and gas driving climate change.
Nearly 200 nations agreed at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai this December to begin "transitioning away" from fossil fuels, the first time in three decades of climate negotiations that the final text of a UN summit explicitly called for moving away from the coal, oil and gas at the root of the crisis.
The agreement, reached after tense negotiations that ran past their deadline, also called on countries to triple global renewable energy capacity and double the rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030, and to accelerate the phase-down of unabated coal power.
Supporters hailed the explicit naming of fossil fuels as historic and overdue, arguing it sent an unmistakable signal that the fossil fuel era must come to an end, with implications for investment and policy worldwide. For decades, the influence of oil-producing nations had kept such language out of the agreements.
Critics, however, including many climate-vulnerable island nations and campaigners, warned that the deal was riddled with loopholes and fell short of the clear "phase-out" the science demanded, and that it lacked the binding commitments and finance needed to drive change at the required speed.
Held in a major petrostate and presided over by an oil executive, the summit was fraught with symbolism and tension. Whatever its limitations, the agreement marked a rhetorical turning point, placing the future of fossil fuels at the centre of global climate diplomacy, even as the far harder work of actually winding them down remained ahead.