For the first time ever, COP28 ended with a deal to transition the world away from fossil fuels, Bloomberg reports. It says the United Arab Emirates (UAE) president Sultan Al Jaber arrived at a deal “strong enough for the US and EU on the need to dramatically curb fossil fuel use while keeping Saudi Arabia and other oil producers on board”. It notes that Al Jaber brought the gavel down on the so-called “global stocktake” text on Wednesday morning – a day later than when COP28 was scheduled to conclude – and was greeted by applause and cheers by delegates. The draft text of the global stocktake deal, which was published early this morning, “calls on parties to contribute to the following global efforts”, including “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net-zero by 2050”, Le Monde reports. It notes that the text does not include a request to “phase out” fossil fuels as many countries and civil society groups hoped for. According to the Press Association, the agreement “defied the expectations of many observers who thought that the host country being a major oil exporter would be too much of a conflict of interest”. The Guardian notes that “climate-justice advocates said the text fell far short of what was needed for a fair transition”. The New York Times lists some of the text’s other commitments, including calling  on nations to triple the amount of renewable energy installed around the world by 2030 and to slash emissions of methane. The Guardian and BBC News have both been live-blogging the latest reaction to the final text before and after it was agreed. 

Coverage from yesterday – published prior to the emergence of the new text – details how, as BusinessGreen describes it, the presidency and negotiating delegations had reportedly been up until 4am “attempting to broker a compromise on the global stocktake text”. The i newspaper says both the US and the UK had been branded “hypocrites” by climate campaigners for “criticising countries that do not agree to a ‘phase out’ of fossil fuels while continuing to develop oil and gas fields domestically”. The Financial Times frames the disputes that had been taking place as “the majority of countries present clash[ing] with Saudi Arabia”.

In wider COP28 news, the Independent has a piece about Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, and her effort to secure a more ambitious outcome for her country. The Guardian has an explainer detailing the importance of “means of implementation” – climate finance and other support measures – for developing countries. New Scientist has a piece about how COP28 has “changed the conversation” around fossil fuels.

In continuing analysis of COP28 attendees, the Guardian finds that at least a quarter of the 34 billionaires registered as delegates at the summit “made their fortunes from highly polluting industries such as petrochemicals, mining and beef production”. The newspaper says the findings “raise concerns about the influence wielded by ultra-rich, mega-emitters on the world’s efforts to tackle the climate crisis”. The article lists fossil-fuel magnates from Russia, India and Nigeria, as well as US tech billionaire Bill Gates, among the “ultra-rich mega-emitters” identified by the NGO Oxfam. Inside Climate News has a piece about how “big business could be the real winner” at COP28. “Among the many deals successfully brokered during the summit were new contracts for oil and gas development, which climate scientists and energy experts say jeopardises global climate goals,” it notes.

Meanwhile, DeSmog reports that oil-and-gas interests at COP28 have been trying to exclude a deal on a fossil-fuel phaseout “by promoting carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a viable climate solution”. It points to new findings from the NGO Oil Change International that almost 80% of current CCS projects “use captured carbon dioxide (CO2) to pump more fossil fuels out of the ground through a process known as enhanced oil recovery”. The Hill has an article about US House Republicans visiting COP28 and touting the benefits of “natural” gas – a fossil fuel. Axios covers the links that activists have been making between the UN climate talks and a ceasefire in Gaza.

Politico reports that Graham Stuart, the minister leading the UK delegation at COP28, left at a “critical stage in negotiations” in order to vote on the Conservative government’s policy on sending asylum seekers to Rwanda. As nations deliberated over the draft agreement text late into the night, environment minister and peer Richard Benyon temporarily replaced Stuart as lead negotiator, the news website reports. A government spokesperson confirmed that Stuart would fly back to London for the vote before returning to Dubai. The Guardian reports that Stuart’s departure meant the “UK government came in for sharp criticism from activists and some delegations” at the summit. The Daily Mirror also has the story on Stuart’s “6,800-mile round trip”. (He was sighted back at the COP28 venue in time for the gavel coming down.)

Separately, the Guardian secured a rare interview with a UK minister at COP28 – namely development minister Andrew Mitchell. He “played down the prospects of imposing a levy on frequent flyers” in order to raise money to deal with the loss and damage caused by climate change. Mitchell also said getting more “non-traditional” donors – namely countries that are not in the global north, such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – to contribute to the newly established loss-and-damage fund was also essential

In more UK news, the Times reports that “net-zero sceptics” on the right of the Conservative Party have said it is “bizarrely inconsistent” for prime minister Rishi Sunak to support oil-and-gas drilling in the North Sea while refusing to support oil extraction in the Falklands Islands. The article says energy companies are lobbying the government to change rules introduced under former prime minister Boris Johnson that ended support for fossil-fuel extraction overseas, including in British overseas territories. The Times also has a column by freelance writer Jawad Iqbal titled “Britain should look to the Falklands for its oil needs”.

The state-run newspaper China Daily says that “milestone declarations and pledges on green farming, food systems and mobilising funds to rehabilitate forests and oceans” featured on the climate agenda at COP28. It adds that a “key policy outcome of the nature, land use and ocean day was a joint statement between the COP28 presidency and the convention on biological diversity, chaired by China”. Chinese economic outlet Jiemian says the initial drafts of the global stocktake text “triggered dissatisfaction from various parties” regarding the phasing out of fossil fuels. China’s climate envoy Xie Zhenhua says that the phase-out of fossil fuels is the most concerning issue for all parties, adding that “China’s position on this matter has already been reflected in the Sunnylands statement. The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (SCMP) carries a commentary by reporter Shi Jiangtao, who writes that “in a sign of China’s influence at COP28, the latest draft deal included language similar to the US-China agreement”. Chinese energy outlet IN-EN.com carries a commentary by Chen Meian, a senior analyst at the Institute for Green Decarbonisation Progress thinktank, who writes that “methane emissions are characterised differently from country to country”, but the “distribution of global methane emission reduction funding” does not reflect these differences. She points to the role of rice paddies in Chinese methane emissions compared to the EU and US, as well as resulting concerns around food security.

Meanwhile, Yicai reports that this year’s central economic work conference, an important meeting held in China which sets the national agenda for the economy of China, calls on policymakers to “actively and prudently advance dual-carbon targets”, accelerating the establishment of a “green and low-carbon supply chain” and the construction of a “new energy system”. However, the SCMP quotes some analysts saying that the use of the phrase “establishing the new before abolishing the old” signals the “favouring [of] a step-by-step approach” and warning against “taking the green drive too far”. Chinese industry outlet BJX News reports that an official from the ministry of ecology and environment (MEE) says that “coal-fired heating facilities that have not undergone one year of actual operation testing should not be dismantled”. China Daily quotes another official from the MEE saying that, “by October, crude oil processing saw a growth of 11.2%, while there was a 5.7% rise year-on-year in thermal power generation and road passenger transport increased by 23.5%…As a result, there has been an increase in emissions of atmospheric pollutants.” 

Elsewhere, the Communist party-affiliated People’s Daily carries an editorial saying that “China must continue to intensify the fight against pollution, adhering to precision pollution control”. The South China Morning Post carries a comment piece by Winston Mok, a private investor, who proposes that the EU and China could “selectively co-finance projects in transport networks, clean energy grids, climate-smart agriculture and digital connectivity” in Africa.

Reuters covers a new US-led report finding that the Arctic faced its hottest summer on record this year, “contributing to extraordinary wildfires and melting glaciers while threatening the rest of the world with problems including higher sea levels”. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) 2023 Arctic Report Card says that summer surface air temperatures in the Arctic were the highest since at least 1900, Reuters says. The Washington Post notes that, according to the report, the Arctic is continuing “to become less icy, wetter and greener”. It says: “The report, by 82 authors in 13 countries, makes clear that the Arctic continues to change, with the past 17 years accounting for the 17 smallest annual minimum sea ice covers in the 45-year satellite record.”

Written prior to the final agreement at COP28, an editorial in Nature says phasing out fossil fuels is “not negotiable”, based on the emissions reductions required to meet the 1.5C goal of the Paris Agreement. “In the end, the climate doesn’t care who emits greenhouse gases. There is only one viable path forward, and that is for everybody to phase out almost all fossil fuels as quickly as possible,” it says. The article concludes: “In the short term at least, the world is all but certain to overshoot the 1.5C goal. But there is nothing special about this threshold: this year’s climate extremes have made it all too clear that there is no truly safe level of warming, and every fraction of a degree matters. The main agenda must be to cut emissions as quickly as possible in an effort to head off expensive and potentially irreversible damage.”​​

A comment piece in Foreign Policy by the publication’s editor-in-chief, Ravi Agrawal, states that, at COP28, “however one interprets the fine print, the reality is that the main obstacle to tackling global emissions is money”. ActionAid USA policy director Brandon Wu writes in Context about the importance of developed countries providing climate finance in order to reach a deal on fossil-fuel phaseout. “Simply put, developing countries have no belief that international finance will be made available. Without this assurance, many of them cannot commit to a fossil fuel phase-out, seeing this as economic and political suicide,” he writes. Writing in the South China Morning Post, columnist Shi Jiangtao welcomes the fact that the world’s two largest emitters, China and the US, have been in “intensive” talks over the past two weeks at COP28. “It shows despite their intensifying divisions, the rival powers can still work together on some of the most pressing issues when they want to,” he says. The bad news, he adds, is that “such a deal still hangs in the air, at least at the time of writing”.

Meanwhile, an editorial in the UK’s Sun newspaper [not yet online] has its take on COP negotiations: “This year’s draft ‘deal’ so far only urges nations to cut fossil fuels if and when they can. Seems reasonable. But do we need some annual jamboree to tell us that?” UK climate-sceptic columnist Allison Pearson writes in the Daily Telegraph that the “struggle to reach agreement at COP28 is a harbinger of growing international resistance to this folly”.

Nigerian president  Bola Ahmed Tinubu writes for CNN that the security threats and socioeconomic challenges facing his country “and their link to climate change” were at the forefront of his mind during COP28. He writes that he is committed to “reconstruct[ing] a better, cleaner nation” following Covid-19 and economic downturns. Tinubu lists Nigeria’s various low-carbon efforts, including launching a carbon market initiative, committing to curb methane emissions and aiming for net-zero emissions between 2050 and 2070. He calls for developed countries to honour their climate finance commitments in order to help Nigeria develop in a low-carbon way. “African countries simply cannot travel on this road alone. There must be a fair and cooperative approach. For too long, too many developed nations have hesitated to do what they should…Nigeria and much of Africa possess a unique advantage — we do not need to decommission coal-fired power plants. We have an unparalleled opportunity to leapfrog decades of conventional, high-emission industry by building our industrial future on a new green foundation,” he writes.

The majority of passenger cars in Europe will be electric by about 2031, a new study suggests. Focusing on battery electric passenger cars, the researchers analyse their adoption across 17 individual countries, Europe and the world, and “consistently find exponential growth trends”. Their modelling of future adoption, based on past trends, “suggest system-wide adoption [of electric vehicles] substantially faster than typical economic analyses have proposed so far”. Despite significant differences in current electric fleet sizes across regions, projected growth rates in electric vehicles “consistently indicate fast doubling times of approximately 15 months, hinting at radical economic and infrastructural consequences in the near future”, the researchers say.

New research analyses climate change coverage in state newspapers across the US. The study constructs a dataset of more than 12,000 climate-change-related articles that appeared in newspapers in 49 US states in 2012 and 2017. Using manual coding and automated text analysis, the researchers find that “coverage reflects geographic differences in the ecological effects of climate change and the specific mix of industries present in a state”.