COP28, this year’s version of the UN’s annual climate conference, is underway in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, set the agenda with a monitory opening speech. This year, Stiell insisted, “has been the hottest year ever for humanity,” with many “terrifying records” broken and “peoples’ lives and livelihoods” hanging in the balance. Humanity, he assured his audience, is “standing at a precipice, facing the Global Stocktake.” This year’s COP28, coming at such an allegedly pivotal point in the climate crisis, is intended to be the setting for the stocktake. Stiell urged member countries to resolve to comply with the new “loss and damage” indemnity payments agreed upon at last year’s COP27, whereby trillions of dollars are supposed to be transferred from developed to underdeveloped countries in the name of climate equity. And he pressed his listeners to commit to “a new energy system,” adding ominously, “if we do not signal the terminal decline of the fossil fuel era as we know it, we welcome our own terminal decline. And we choose to pay with people’s lives.”
Stiell also laid out a map for the next few years of global climate reforms:
So let me spell out that vision and what’s going to happen over the next two years. In 2024, countries will submit their first Biennial Transparency Report. This will mean the reality of individual progress can’t be concealed. We will also agree at COP29 how to finance this massive shift, with the new Finance Goal. And let this be your first official notice that early in 2025, countries must deliver new Nationally Determined Contributions. Please start working on them now. This takes us to COP30, where every single commitment — on finance, adaptation, and mitigation — has to be in line with a 1.5 degree world. Science tells us we have around six years before we exhaust the planet’s ability to cope with our emissions. Before we blow through the 1.5 degree limit.
In other words, next year member countries must report to the UN under the so-called Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) the progress they are making toward the goals in the Paris Agreement. Specifically, in the words of the ETF Reference Manual, parties to the agreement are required “to communicate the domestic and, where applicable, international actions that they intend to take to mitigate climate change, adapt to its effects, and support other countries in their mitigation and adaptation efforts.” In 2025, the first “contributions” of loss and damage payments must occur. And the goal remains to bring the entire planet into compliance with a radical new global climate and energy regime that will supposedly prevent average global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.
This is the ambitious agenda of this year’s climate conference. The coming climate regime, as Stiell openly professed, is intended to put an end to “the fossil fuel era” and to impose unprecedented levels of bureaucratic control on every government and every private citizen from the Arctic to the equatorial tropics.
