Enough Meaningless Phrases on Fossil Fuels
The Pied Piper of bureaucratic double-talk is leading consensus on net zero down a haphazard path.
Sultan Al Jaber, chief executive officer of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. and COP28 president-designate.
Photographer: Christopher Pike/BloombergA sphinxlike term keeps popping up in discourse around phasing out fossil fuels: “unabated.” Easily overlooked, it’s an important modifier that changes an ambitious demand — stop burning fossil fuels — into phrases with more elusive meanings.
The European Union has decided it will push for the phasing out of unabated fossil fuels at COP28 in Dubai. More than 130 businesses, collectively worth almost $1 trillion, signed a letter this week calling for governments to commit to the full discontinuance of unabated hydrocarbons. US climate envoy John Kerry has pressed for the end of new unabated coal-fired power plants. Sultan Al Jaber, president-designate of this year’s United Nations climate summit, has set an action plan for “an energy system free of unabated fossil fuels in the middle of this century.” Back in 2021, at COP26 in Glasgow, nations promised to accelerate efforts toward the “phasedown of unabated coal power.”
This ambiguity leaves an enormous loophole for the continued expansion of fossil-fuel production under the vague promise that all will be abated in the future.