![]() And that is the way that industrial change happens. ![]() "When you think about cars replacing horse-drawn carts, something comes along that is just better. "When you think about landline phones going to mobile. "And that is generally how industrial transformations happen," he said. "It is important, essentially, for the new low-carbon alternatives to be cheaper and better than the high-carbon existing technologies. "I think that's very largely true that … certainly on a global scale," said Ed Crooks, vice-chair of the global energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. Perhaps for this reason, there was another view that was taking ever clearer shape on the ground in Dubai this past fortnight.Īnd it pretty much boiled down to this: rather than wait for governments to agree to phase out fossil fuels, renewable energy needed to make them redundant. Given that context, hopes by many countries, including most of Australia's Pacific Island neighbours, for a dramatic deal to phase out fossil fuels face perpetual frustration. Saudis and Emiratis often live in palatial homes and when they do venture out, can spend their time in equally grand shopping malls and office towers.īetween their cars, their homes and their places of work and leisure, they hardly ever have to leave air-conditioned comfort. Gleaming cities with highways half a mile wide – and cars almost as big to match – spring out of the desert landscape. Today they are some of the wealthiest countries per capita in the region. Windfalls from oil sales have made UAE and Saudi Arabia richīarely half a century ago, the economies of both countries were relatively non-existent, consisting almost entirely of subsistence agriculture and camel, sheep and goat herding. Often, it can be much, much more than that. Reportedly, the cost of getting that oil out of the ground in Saudi Arabia is as little as $US5 a barrel.īy contrast, that barrel of oil can be sold on the world market today for about $US70 a barrel. The amount of oil sitting under the sands of the Middle East is mind-blowing and the jewel in the crown is without doubt Saudi Arabia. One is that countries will almost invariably act in their own interests, no matter the pressure from peers on the world stage.Īcclaimed energy writer Daniel Yergin has chronicled how the oil reserves of the Middle East, once fully understood by the US and its Western allies in the middle of the 20th century, were described as the "biggest prize in all history". The episode serves to highlight a couple of underlying truths in the global warming debate. ![]() The likes of Saudi Arabia and Russia, whose economies rise and fall on the strength of export prices for fossil fuels, chose not to kneecap themselves. While many hailed it as a huge step forward, it was also met with objections including from small island nations like Samoa who told the conference "It seems that you just gavelled the decisions when the small island states weren't in the room." In the end, the final deal was passed with "historic" references to "transition away from fossil fuels", a pledge to triple renewable energy and a commitment to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by mid-century. So if the UAE couldn't get the other petro-states over the line, who could? Sultan Al Jaber, the COP28 president who is also the boss of the UAE's oil champion ADNOC, (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company) was pushing for a deal that landed the "most ambitious language" on fossil fuels. Oil accounts for about half of Emirati economyĪcross the border in Saudi Arabia – the world's biggest oil exporter in 2023 – the fossil fuel is responsible for almost two-thirds of government revenue. There was chatter that a landmark deal to phase out fossil fuels - which is an umbrella term for coal, oil and gas - to stop the world from boiling itself, might just happen.ĬOP28 – the 28 th Conference of Parties where nearly 200 countries gather annually to try to mitigate climate change – was after all being hosted by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a nation that is almost the embodiment of the petro-state. For a few brief moments late in the piece at COP28, it seemed the improbable would happen.
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