COP28 decision praised by Annalena Baerbock and Saudi Arabia

2023-12-13 19:01:15

Sometimes history is made with a hammer. Without prior discussion and without hesitation, Sultan al-Jaber stated on Wednesday morning that he heard no objection. “So it has been decided,” he said on the podium in the central hall of the World Climate Conference. Hammer blow, draft approved. Host al-Jaber had been emphasizing for weeks that it was not just about a paper, but about much more. The climate conference in Dubai was supposed to be a “historic” one. After the hammer blow, many found that it fulfilled this requirement.

The resolution of the climate conference contains the response of almost all countries in the world to their “global inventory”. In Dubai they gave themselves an accurate but rather poor certificate. It states that “due to human activities, especially through the emission of greenhouse gases, global warming has already progressed by around 1.1 degrees Celsius.” It also says that it won’t stay that way if everyone continues like this – not even if everyone makes their nationally determined contributions to climate protection in full. More ambition is needed. So an agreement should be reached in Dubai, because in an atmosphere that everyone shares, it makes no sense for individual states to reduce their own emissions when everyone else continues to happily burn whatever fossil raw materials they have mined or purchased.

However, if 198 parties negotiate, agreement would be difficult even if the unanimity principle did not apply. But that’s just how it is, so any oil state – and of course everyone else – can block a compromise. That was how it was in Dubai for almost two weeks. Saudi Arabia in particular resisted any formulation that would put an ax to the winding towers and thus question its economic model. An economic model to which the COP host, the United Arab Emirates, owes so much prosperity that it was able to build a metropolis in the desert, Dubai, including the tallest building in the world.

Almost every delegate can tell a climate change story

During the conference, however, the high-rise and tall buildings could often only be admired from up close. A milky blanket of smog had settled over the city. It wasn’t difficult for the delegates, who were knowledgeable about climate technology, to identify the large gas power plants as the cause. But many countries have called for a fundamental exit from fossil fuels not primarily out of concern for Emirati air quality, but because their use is by far the biggest driver of global warming. There are said to have been more than 120 towards the end of the conference.

The fatal consequences of rising temperatures were not only felt in Libya and Greece in 2023, the warmest since records began. Almost every delegate can tell a climate change story, no matter what country they come from. These are never pretty, on the contrary: farmers lose their crops due to droughts, coastal residents lose their homes as they sink into the sea, and many lose their lives in forest fires or floods. This suffering should not continue to grow. The stories should have a happy ending in a few decades at the latest. But for this, science is clear, a completely new story is now necessary: ​​that of an earth whose inhabitants pull themselves together and get serious about what has already been called “climate protection” in many places, but according to the diagnosis, which is dealt with in a few sentences, “ “Global inventory” hardly meets this requirement.