New COP draft decision sees big steps back on fossil fuels

“While the words ‘coal’ and ‘fossil fuels’ have remained in the new draft decision, huge new loopholes have been introduced that see these efforts significantly weakened.”

"The aim to phase out all fossil fuel subsidies has now been rowed back to just ‘inefficient’ subsidies – which begs the question of what an efficient use of public money to bankroll the fossil fuel industry could possibly be. This term has been used at the G7 and the G20, but never been properly defined, and leaves an enormous space for countries to claim their subsidies aren’t ‘inefficient'"

“The phase out of coal power has now been watered down to a phase out of ‘unabated’ coal power – leaving the door open to keep running climate-wrecking coal fired power stations on the future promise of carbon capture and storage (CCS) cutting their emissions. The fossil fuel industry has always promised that CCS has already been just over the horizon, but has never materialised at scale. The false promise of CCS should not be used as an excuse to keep the coal industry alive.”

Global Witness’ research on the current status of fossil fuel-based CCS in the energy system in January found that:

• The scale of deployment of CCS to date is significantly less than proponents have predicted, with only 26 CCS plants currently in operation globally.
• Global operational CCS capacity is currently 39MtCO2 per year, this is about 0.1% of annual global emissions from fossil fuels.
• 81% of carbon captured to date has been used to extract more oil via the process of Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). This means CCS is being predominantly used for carbon-emitting oil extraction that wouldn’t have otherwise been possible.