Dubai, United Arab Emirates—Earlier today at COP28, the United Nations' climate summit, U.N. Secretary-General Antonion Guterres declared that "a central aspect, in my opinion, of the success of the COP will be for the COP to reach a consensus on the need to phase out fossil fuels in line with a time framework that is in line with the 1.5 degree limits." In other words, Guterres wants COP28 to impose a global deadline for the elimination of fossil fuels from the world's energy supplies.
The new proposed text for the Global Stocktake (GST)—the principal document being composed at the conference—may disappoint Guterres. Though the options in the negotiating text all proposed some goal for the "phase out" of fossil fuels as of last Friday, that term is nowhere in the new GST text.
