A media nudge group on climate change says journalists need to keep the pressure up on governments and businesses or COP28 won’t be enough to save the world.Covering Climate Now (CCNow), an organization claiming 500 media members with a combined audience of two million people, says COP28 was only a good step to saving the world. CCNow quoted one of its founding member organizations, The Guardian, to say so.“Is the COP 28 agreement a historic deal that will spell the eventual end of fossil fuels?" the Guardian’s Fiona Harvey asked. “Or will it be one more step on the road to hell?"The answer, Harvey suggested, could well be both. "The tension between those two outcomes is something journalists need to understand, scrutinize and make clear to our audiences going forward," she said. "Our coverage needs to embrace the duality long at the heart of international climate negotiations: what science says that humanity must do to avoid climate breakdown, versus what our political and economic systems want to do.”CCNow bemoaned that, “COP28’s final text did not endorse the phase-out of fossil fuels that science says is necessary.” However CCNow did deem the call for “transitioning away” from fossil fuels as “undeniably historic.” Mohammed Adow of Climate Shift Africa, said, “This result would have been unheard of two years ago, especially at a COP meeting in a petrostate…It shows that even oil and gas producers can see we’re heading for a fossil-free world.” The 2015 Paris Agreement’s effort to limit climate increases to 1.5-degrees-C led governments and financiers to increasingly abandon coal as a money-loser in favour of wind, solar and energy efficiency. Participants in COP28 said more of the same.UN Secretary-General António Guterres told fossil fuel backers, “whether you like it or not, a fossil fuel phase out is inevitable.”Jennifer Morgan, the German government’s climate envoy, said COP28’s signals “are clear: If you are an investor, the future is renewable. Fossil fuels are stranded assets.”Even so, CCNow says it’s unclear what the result will be and everything the world has done until now has still been inadequate.“The crucial question, as always with the climate emergency, is how fast a fossil fuel phase out happens. The Paris Agreement did help bend the curve — instead of heading for a 4-degree-C future, we’re now on track for roughly 2.5 degrees C — but even 2.5 degrees C would bring utter catastrophe and global emissions are still not falling,” wrote CCNow.Dr. Friederike Otto, the co-founder of World Weather Attribution, said until fossil fuels are phased out, “the world will continue to become a more dangerous, more expensive and more uncertain place to live.”CCNow said the open discussion of phasing out fossil fuels by oil-producing countries begs the media to respond.“This shift in terrain opens up a host of fresh angles for journalists. We should be pressing government and corporate leaders on how fast they will phase out fossil fuels, why they continue, so far, to back massive taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuels and when rich countries will finally provide the financial aid they are legally obligated to give poor countries so the latter can leave fossil fuels behind as well,” CCNow proclaimed.“Pursuing such stories will help journalists highlight the many shortcomings in the COP28 agreement. Both climate finance and climate adaptation were sidelined in the final text, a huge problem on both moral and practical grounds and the newly established loss and damage facility remains scantily funded.”CCNow warned a road to hell might still be paved with COP28’s good intentions, unless billions of dollars are spent and journalists keep sounding the alarm.“Unless poor countries get the money needed to go green, their future fossil fuel emissions will worsen climate impacts that endanger rich and poor alike. And without many billions of additional dollars to help vulnerable communities boost their resilience to the extreme heat, storms, drought, and rising seas that rich countries’ emissions have caused, countless people will suffer and die,” CCnow explained.“Yes, Dubai made history, but it’s a complex history: a success and a failure all in one. Now, as the negotiators, activists, scientists and fossil fuel lobbyists head home, our work as journalists has only begun.”
