Climate experts are underwhelmed by the world's latest attempt to prevent catastrophe: 'Bare minimum'

While the deal was described as "historic" by the COP28 president, climate experts noted loopholes in the text and a lack of funding.

• A COP28 deal labeled as "historic" has drawn lukewarm responses from experts.
• The deal acknowledged the role of oil and gas as culprits in the climate crisis for the first time.
• But it stopped short of calling for a clearly timed phase-out of fossil fuels. 

A COP28 climate deal, described as "historic" by the summit's president, has drawn lukewarm responses from experts.

The deal hashed out at the UN summit in Dubai sets out goals to be reached by 2050 in the fight against the climate crisis.

For the first time, it calls on all countries to move away from using fossil fuels. It also includes important milestones, such as tripling renewable energy by 2030.

But it stops short of setting a clear timeline to phase out fossil fuels — something that countries such as China and Saudi Arabia had strongly resisted.

"The decision at #COP28 to finally recognize that the climate crisis is, at its heart, a fossil fuel crisis is an important milestone," former vice president Al Gore, who chairs a climate advocacy non-profit, said in a post on X.

"But it is also the bare minimum we need and is long overdue. The influence of petrostates is still evident in the half measures and loopholes included in the final agreement."

Climate experts Business Insider spoke to agreed that the deal falls short of what is needed, as emissions must be cut by almost half by 2030 to prevent global warming from going 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels

"It's better than it could have been, but could try harder," Tim Benton, director of the Environment and Society Centre at Chatham House, a London-based think-tank, said.

Marina B. Romanello, a health researcher at University College London and executive director of the Lancet Countdown, an international research collaboration that tracks climate change, agreed. She noted this should be seen as a "diplomatic win," but "we are way past the point in which small progress can be celebrated," she said.

"The new text opens loopholes that could mean a perpetuation of our addiction to fossil fuels. This is incompatible with a healthy future," she said.

John Kerry, the special climate envoy for the US, said the agreement was a cause for "optimism." He added: "Many people would have liked clear language about the need to begin peaking and reducing fossil fuels in this critical decade. But we know this was a compromise between many parties."

The wording of the legal text has been the subject of fiery debates in the two weeks leading up to the agreement.

An earlier version of the text proposed to call for a "phase out" of fossil fuels by 2050, but this wording was rejected from a draft published Monday by the COP presidency, which proposed to call for a "phase down" instead.

While this may seem like a pedantic play of words, the distinction between "phase out" and "phase down" matters as the latter doesn't call for countries to stop using fossil fuels by 2050, Romanello told BI.

The move drew ire from some member states that threatened to walk out of negotiations, which would have brought them to a standstill. The text needed to be approved unanimously by nearly 200 member states to pass.

In the end, the deal agreed upon a transition away from fossil fuels, and accelerating efforts toward net zero emission using zero and low carbon fuels well before or by around mid-century.

Benton noted "the devil is in the details."

"There is quite a lot of scope in the verbiage for multiple readings of the text," he said.

This language still allows countries to include carbon capture and storage in their energy transition strategy, an approach that has been criticized by climate activists.

"Unfortunately that technology does not exist, has not been developed at stage. So it's something we cannot count on," said Marinello.

Experts also noted that the UN summit failed on another front: attracting funding to help countries bankroll their transition to clean energy.

The funding is a big part of the global Net Zero strategy, in part because it can support lower-income countries to step away from fossil fuels while continuing to develop over the next couple of decades.

"The presidency we're trying to suggest that people come with their checkbooks. But I didn't see that not on any reasonable scale," said Bracking.

A Loss and Damage fund, formally established at COP28 to provide financial assistance to countries impacted by the effects of climate change, gathered initial commitments that reached about $750 million.

Bracking qualified that amount as "paltry."

"That's really small and it's an insult, really, that you set up a whole new fund and then you only commit 750 million to it," she said.

"My university, Kings, we have an annual turnover of about $800 million — and that's one university. Now you think about how much it would actually cost to help eight billion people, 800 million of them whose livelihoods are already at risk or threatened," she added.