Countries To Continue Using Coal Despite COP26 'Weak' Recommendations - Expert

The COP26 climate summit did not produce any binding agreements, and its recommendation about phasing down coal is weak and will hardly be followed by countries given the current circumstances, an energy expert told Sputnik

BRUSSELS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 15th November, 2021) The COP26 climate summit did not produce any binding agreements, and its recommendation about phasing down coal is weak and will hardly be followed by countries given the current circumstances, an energy expert told Sputnik.

COP26, held in the Scottish city of Glasgow from October 31 to November 12, was meant to reinforce meaningful commitments to fulfill the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement on greenhouse emission reduction, carbon neutrality, global warming and climate finance. In the resulting final statement, published on Saturday, COP26 participants agreed to phase down coal, work on ending fossil fuel subsidies and adhere to a common timeframe on emission reductions.

For the first time in history, the official COP document named a specific energy source coal, Samuele Furfari, a professor of energy geopolitics at ULB university in Brussels, said. However, there are no concrete measures listed and the text itself is hard to understand, the expert noted.

"The final text does not impose anything; it only 'calls upon the participants' to reduce the words used are 'phase down,' not 'phase out' their use of coal to fuel industry, generate electricity and for heating. The text is also difficult to understand. Does CO2 capture allow coal extraction to continue? When the text speaks of 'inefficient subsidies,' what does it mean? This text is ill-written and weak. It shows how little this conference has achieved," Furfari said.

The text also lacks clarity when it comes to the "capture of CO2," the technology for which is currently not economically viable for either India or China, main coal users, as it reduces coal efficiency by 10%, the expert remarked.

"The Glasgow agreement is not a game changer at all. The main users of coal, the USA, China and India, will continue to use coal and increase extraction. Fossil energies, gas, petroleum and coal still have a good future in the coming decades. The main issue is what energy could be used to replace them," Furfari said.

Renewable sources, according to the expert, cannot be the sole answer as they all have their limits, while nuclear energy, which is more suitable to replace fossil fuels, has not been mentioned in the Glasgow text and "is at present not even officially a solution accepted by the European Commission in its Green deal document.

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"So the game continues, with a strong participation of fossil fuels," he added.

While some European coal mining countries, such as France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, have closed down their mines after extracting most of the resource, Germany, Poland, Greece and the Czech Republic continue to produce coal, Furfari said. Germany is the "champion of coal-originating CO2 emissions" in Europe as it needs to compensate for the shortages left by wind and solar energy production, but Berlin plans to switch fully to Russian gas soon, he noted.

Poland, another large European coal producer and user, faces social challenges closing its barely profitable mines as they provide jobs for tens of thousands of people, so they cannot be expected to phase out coal anytime soon, Furfari said.

"Nothing changes for coal-exporting countries. We are very far from the phasing-out of coal as an energy source," he stressed.

All things considered, Furfari said he agreed with eco-activist Greta Thunberg that COP26 was all talk, since it produced no binding agreements and the document it did release was very weak and unclear. In the history of COPs, only two of them have resulted in a binding commitment so far the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and the Paris Agreement in 2015, he noted.

"In these instances, the negotiated texts were ratified by the participating states and then each country's representative signed the document at the United Nations in New York, adding the ratification document. It is a serious and complex process," the expert said, adding that even then, the documents did not impose any obligations, but rather advised participants to set out a concrete objective and stick to it.

COP26, in turn, did not achieve even that and was "like a party where everyone brings along the food they wish to eat," Furfari said.

"The COP26 is a failure," he concluded.