Helsingør and Houston are separated by just over 8,000 kilometres – but when it came to sending out signals on the energy transition this week, the two cities appeared to exist on entirely different planets.
In the Danish port city, as dozens of ministers fired the starting gun on the annual climate diplomacy race, the focus was on putting December’s landmark Cop28 decision into practice. In Dubai, governments agreed for the first time to start shifting away from fossil fuels. But officials are now contemplating how to make that work in the real world – and, crucially, who will pay for it.
Meanwhile, in oil and gas-rich Texas, top fossil fuel executives took to the stage at the energy industry conference CERAWeek, where they cast doubt on the transition away from fossil fuels agreed at Cop28, with Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser calling it a “fantasy”.
In the courts, Republican-led US states sued the Biden administration over its recent decision to pause new approvals for fossil gas exports.
Energy transition crossroads
For climate policy observers, these opposing forces are not entirely surprising.
Romain Ioualalen, global policy manager at campaign group Oil Change International, said the Cop28 decision puts the fossil fuel industry at a crossroads: either it pours more investment into renewable energy, or it doubles down on oil, gas and coal in a bid to undermine the green shift as much as possible.
“It seems to have chosen the latter – and unless governments immediately intervene to end fossil fuel expansion, people and planet will pay the price,” he added.
Pushing for faster adoption of clean energy certainly appears to be the intention on the international climate policy stage, where the political machinery is clanking back into gear after what Danish climate minister Dan Jørgensen dubbed “historic progress” in Dubai.
“Important decisions have been made on the action,” he told the start of the Danish summit. “Now, how do we pay for it?”
Cop28 president, Sultan Al Jaber, delivers remarks at the Copenhagen Climate Ministerial, flanked by Cop29 incoming president Mukhtar Babayev. REUTERS/Ali Withers
The question of finding money for the energy transition in developing countries will be front and centre this year as countries need to agree on a “new collective quantified goal” (NCQG) for climate finance at Cop29 in November, which will kick in from next year.
The battle lines are already drawn: developing nations want their richer counterparts to stump up the highest amount of cash with the fewest strings attached. Developed countries want other governments, including China and fossil fuel-rich Gulf nations, to join the list of donors.
The size of the money pot – and the conditions to tap into it – will be particularly important for emerging economies. They want help to finance the costly emission-slashing measures they are being asked to take.
For Mukhtar Babayev, Azerbaijan’s incoming Cop29 president, the negotiations on the new finance goal represent an opportunity to rebuild trust. Unlocking more funds, he told fellow ministers in Denmark, “will empower all parties to raise the ambition” of their upcoming climate plans.
Cop Troika urges “high-ambition” NDCs
The updated nationally determined contributions (NDCs) that all countries have been asked to submit by early 2025 was the other main talking point in Denmark on Thursday and Friday.
The so-called ‘Troika’ of the hosts of Cop28 (UAE), Cop29 (Azerbaijan) and Cop30 (Brazil) has tasked itself with building momentum and prompting countries to get moving.
On the eve of the Danish summit, the Cop presidencies sent a letter to all parties calling for “early submissions of high ambition NDCs that decisively take forward the UAE Consensus [the agreement struck in Dubai]”.
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The Troika “will aim to raise and reframe ambition for the development process” of the national climate action blueprints, pushing for more support, resources and finance, it added.
But the missive did not go down well with developed countries – and, above all, with the United States.
Its deputy special envoy for climate Sue Biniaz said she was “quite surprised” at the Troika’s suggestion that this year’s “focus on NDCs should be all about support” and that the Cop hosts defined a “high ambition NDC” for developed countries as one that includes finance for developing countries. Using that kind of wording could be “highly prejudicial” to climate finance negotiations, she warned.
Do as I say, not as I do
In the letter, the Cop host governments also pledged to demonstrate their own commitment by submitting NDCs that are aligned with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C.
That announcement raised some eyebrows. The UAE and Brazil have some of the world’s biggest plans to expand fossil fuel production between now and 2050, while Azerbaijan’s economy primarily relies on fossil fuel extraction and it is poised to hike gas exports.
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Those intentions clash with what the International Energy Agency (IEA) says is required to remain on a 1.5C trajectory: fossil fuel demand needs to fall 80% by 2050, meaning no new upstream oil and gas projects are needed, as of now.
Harjeet Singh of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative said that discrepancy “raises serious questions about the alignment between [the Troika’s] words and their actions”.
“These countries must disentangle themselves from fossil fuel interests and lead climate action by example, pressuring wealthier nations that continue to shirk their historic and moral responsibilities,” he added.
Fossil fuel reality check
The rhetoric coming from the fossil fuel industry assembled at Houston’s CERAWeek suggests strong pressure will be needed.
Saudi Aramco CEO Nasser called for more, not less, investment in oil and gas, as he claimed that the current energy transition strategy is “visibly failing on most fronts”.
President and CEO, Amin Nasser, asserts at #CERAWeek 2024 that energy consumers around the world need lower-carbon energy with minimal disruptions to their daily lives and calls for a new, multi-source, multi-speed, and multi-dimensional road to a realistic transition#aramco pic.twitter.com/OEkQvuK9HD
— aramco (@aramco) March 19, 2024
Meg O’Neill, chief executive of Australian oil and gas firm Woodside Energy, said the shift to clean energy cannot “happen at an unrealistic pace”. The bosses of oil giants Shell, ExxonMobil and Petrobras echoed similar views.
One fossil fuel executive who is equally at home in industry talking shops and climate diplomacy circles is Cop28 president Sultan Al Jaber.
On Tuesday, he told attendees at the oil and gas conference in the US that “there is just no avoiding that the energy transition will take time”.
Two days later, over in Denmark, he emphasised that “governments and all relevant parties” have to be honest about what moving away from fossil fuels will involve.
“We can’t misguide or mislead anyone anymore,” he said, sending out a message that could apply on both sides of the Helsingør-Houston divide. “We must confront the facts very early. Those who are in this room. It is our job, our duty to do that.”
The post Climate leaders, oil bosses pitch alternate energy-transition realities appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate leaders, oil bosses pitch alternate energy-transition realities
Claver Gatete is Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Jason Veysey is Energy Modeling Program Director and Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Lisa Sachs is Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University.
The case for global energy transition has rarely been clearer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year exposed the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems, while the falling cost of renewables, the rising penetration of electric vehicles, and the growing value of demand flexibility have made the direction of travel obvious. The benefits of a clean, secure, integrated system are no longer in dispute. What remains unclear is how to build it.
Countries around the world have called for faster renewable energy deployment and alternative energy arrangements. A secure, affordable, resilient, decarbonised system requires specific investments in specific places in a specific sequence, optimised across sectors and borders. But very few governments have the analytical foundation to translate those imperatives into investment.
The two instruments that are supposed to determine investment priorities for decarbonisation – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and country platforms – cannot answer the most basic question facing any country undertaking an energy transition: what should the energy system look like?
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To close this gap, every country needs a bankable, economy-wide optimisation model for its energy system. A model is not a plan, but it can help answer the critical question of what the future energy system should look like. It shows how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, calculates investment requirements and sequencing, and quantifies how system costs are affected by assumptions, policies, and exogenous variables like trade policy and financing terms.
Tool for efficient investment
Optimisation is a simplified way of simulating an energy system, but it can be an extremely powerful tool for moving energy planning from reactive (how do we manage the disparate actions in the energy system?) to intentional (what energy system underpins our national objectives?). A model can show how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, and how investment requirements are quantified and sequenced.
Optimisation models can treat the energy system and the sectors it serves as an integrated whole, optimising across sectors and projects in ways that can be mutually reinforcing. If considered independently, growth in industrial demand, transport electrification, and digital infrastructure can add stress to the energy system. But an optimised plan can arrange these and other changes in an efficient, synergistic way.
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New load can be added where low-cost power is available; industrial customers can ensure the viability of investments in energy supply; electric vehicle charging policy can smooth load curves and reduce costs for all consumers.
Additionally, optimisation modeling can also change the financeability of investments. Taken alone, each project faces uncertainty about the rest of the system, which raises the cost of capital and causes projects to stall or unwind after contracts are signed. A coherent, optimised plan makes visible the coordination that private capital would otherwise have to bet on: identified offtake, sequenced and committed transmission, contracted power supply, and so on.
What COP31 and COP32 should do
The upcoming COPs in Turkey and Ethiopia can shift the center of gravity of international climate cooperation from fragmented commitments to planning. Three moves are urgently needed.
First, optimised, economy-wide, long-term energy system planning must be the foundation on which any meaningful NDC, country platform, or finance commitment rests. NDCs are typically drafted by environment or single-line ministries, with limited cross-sectoral input from ministries of energy, finance, and planning. They contain targets, derived from sectoral strategies or national commitments, not from an analytically grounded picture of what the energy system should look like and what investments would make it work. Country platforms are generally a portfolio of investments assembled from existing project pipelines, rather than derived from a system-level analysis of what an optimised, decarbonised energy system would require.
Second, recognise regions as a key planning unit. Modern integrated energy systems are inherently regional. Renewable endowments are unevenly distributed; balancing variable supply across borders lowers aggregate cost, reduces redundant backup capacity, and unlocks economies of scale no individual nation can achieve. Many energy investments in Southeast Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia may only be financeable in a regional context. Assessing domestic infrastructure without regional optimisation perpetuates the perception that decarbonisation is more expensive than it is.
COP31 leaders unveil global targets, with spotlight on electrification
Third, finance the planning capacity. A coordinated commitment by multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and philanthropic partners to help every region and its constituent countries develop and maintain their own modelling capability, with open-source tools and regional analytical hubs, would close the most consequential gap in the current architecture. The cost is small relative to current spending on country platforms, failed project preparation, and misallocated infrastructure investment.
This includes supporting regional institutions such as the ASEAN Centre for Energy, the African Energy Commission, regional power pools, and the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization to determine what optimised regional systems require. Country-by-country pledging, repeated at every COP, will not deliver what meaningfully integrated systems can.
The 2026 energy crisis made the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems newly visible. That window of clarity will close. The international community should seize the moment to build the planning foundation that has been missing for thirty years, rather than commissioning another round of NDCs or pledges, striving for outcomes neither was designed to deliver.
The post Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition
The world is currently experiencing what is expected to become the strongest El Niño on record – dubbed a “super El Niño” by many.
El Niño is the warm phase of a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere.
This temporarily raises global temperatures and reshapes rainfall and extreme weather around the world – impacting the lives of billions of people.
The current El Niño event began in June and is expected to last into 2027.
El Niño is part of a wider climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.
The ENSO cycle also has a cool phase, known as La Niña, as well as a “neutral” phase. El Niño and La Niña events typically last between nine and 12 months, but can go on longer.
Below, Carbon Brief explains how the ENSO cycle works, its impacts on extreme weather and global temperatures and why this El Niño event is projected to be the most intense since records began.
The post Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/el-nino-explainer/index.html
The second-largest reservoir in the US reached a record-low water height on Saturday – just days after the country’s largest reservoir broke its own record.
Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are located on the Colorado River.
They provide water for populations across seven US states in the south-western US, with around 40 million people getting some or all of their municipal water from the Colorado River.
The river also provides water for around 5.5m acres (22,258 square kilometres) of farmland across Colorado, Arizona, California and the other states in the river basin.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that climate change, population growth and over-consumption are all contributing to the current record-low levels of the reservoirs.
Record lows
At full capacity, Lakes Mead and Powell can hold a combined 68 cubic kilometres of water – enough to supply all household consumption in the contiguous US for nearly 1.5 years. However, the water level in both reservoirs has been declining for decades.
The chart below shows the water level of Lake Mead, in metres above mean sea level. The reservoir, which began to fill in 1935 following the construction of the Hoover Dam, has a “full pool” maximum capacity of 347.60 metres. The water level in Lake Mead reached a record low of 317.11 metres on 7 August.
The following chart shows the water level of Lake Powell, in metres above mean sea level. Lake Powell’s full-pool level is 1,127.76 metres.
While the reservoir reached its maximum capacity several times in the 1980s, it has not done so since. On 15 August, the water level in Lake Powell was recorded at a new record-low of 1,072.87 metres.
Both reservoirs have continued to decline in the days since breaking their respective records. The downward trend will largely continue in both lakes until next spring, when the snowpack in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin begins to melt, says Dr Jack Schmidt, a senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The big dilemma of the moment is that we’re only in the middle of August, and we have no assurance of what the coming winter will be. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will be depleting overall total basin reservoir storage from now until, roughly, early April.”
Compounding factors
The record lows across the two reservoirs are the result of several compounding factors, experts tell Carbon Brief.
Since the turn of the 20th century, the amount of water flowing along the Upper Colorado River has declined by about 20%. Research suggests that half of this decline can be attributed to human-induced climate change.
Most of the river’s streamflow comes from the snowpack of the Upper Colorado River Basin, which stretches across five western US states but is primarily located in Colorado and Utah.
This region has been gripped by a historic “megadrought” for more than a quarter of a century. Nearly half of the megadrought’s intensity over 2000-18 is attributable to climate change, according to a 2020 study.
At the same time, the increasing population in the US south-west has put added pressure on the Colorado River’s water supply. The number of people obtaining some or all of their water from the Colorado system has grown by 15 million (around 60%) since 1992.
Schmidt tells Carbon Brief:
“There’s an ultimate cause of the present water crisis, and there’s a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is a warming climate, a warming planet and a pretty clear correlation between warming conditions and decreased runoff in the Colorado River Basin.
“The proximate cause is that in this messy democratic republic of ours, big policy decisions that match the variability of the climate occur painfully slowly – with intense political negotiations – and only incrementally.”
On 31 July, the US Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water resources in the western US, released an environmental impact statement on its proposed post-2026 strategy for managing Lakes Powell and Mead. The strategy itself has not been released yet.
Schmidt notes that the statement does appear to give the Bureau flexibility to “respond to crisis” by reducing the delivery of water to several states. However, he adds:
“They acknowledge it won’t work if we just stay critically dry, and of course every climate model for the 21st century, especially with a continually warming planet, says that that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
The post Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels
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