Fossilized
After a few newsworthy bumps in the road, the COP28 climate conference came to a somewhat happy ending — depending on who you ask — as almost 200 countries made a landmark pledge to "transition away" from fossil fuels for the first time in history.
Representatives agreed to the deal in the final hours of the annual UN summit and were met with a standing ovation, though activists took issue with the way the language around fossil fuels, which account for almost 90% of the world’s CO₂emissions, had been dialed down in the new agreement.
The beginning of the end
With a slew of extreme weather events, ever-warming waters, and 2023 officially being declared as the hottest year on record this month, the intervention couldn't have come soon enough. Indeed, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell expressed regret at not having “turned the page on the fossil fuel era” — but did hail the outcome as “the beginning of the end”.
While renewable energy generation has been ticking up in recent years, even surpassing coal for the first time in 2022, the amount of fossil fuel-generated energy that we’ve been using globally has hit new heights. According to the Energy Institute, consumption of fossil fuel energy reached a record 137,000 terawatt-hours in 2022, with 39% of that coming from oil alone.
