Greta Thunberg calls COP28 climate deal a ‘stab in the back’

As the dust settles on the climate deal struck in Dubai last week, prominent climate activists are making their position clear: COP28 was yet another betrayal.

Greta Thunberg has become increasingly critical of the UN climate conference’s capacity to deliver real change.

“COP has turned into a PR event,” the now 20-year-old Swedish activist said in Glasgow in 2021. Greta gave COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh a swerve for the first time since shooting to global fame in 2018, denouncing it as another opportunity for “greenwashing, lying and cheating.”

Her verdict on COP28? “Another betrayal and a stab in the back,” she declared on Friday.

Why are climate activists calling COP28 a failure?

After 30 years, fossil fuels were included in the final text, known as the UAE Consensus,  agreed on 13 December.

But calls for a phaseout – supported by the EU and more than a 100 countries – were rejected by several petrostates. Instead, COP28 produced a more ambiguous agreement to “transition away” from the polluting fuels.

Nearly 200 countries also agreed to adopt a raft of measures, including more clean energy production, in order to avert the worst effects of climate change.

However critics say the deal will not prevent global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average. This is the point at which scientists warn that global heating will trigger catastrophic and irreversible impacts, from melting ice sheets to the collapse of ocean currents.

“This text is toothless and it is nowhere even close to being sufficient to keep us within the 1.5 degree limit,” Thunberg told Reuters outside Sweden’s parliament where she and a handful of other protesters were calling for climate justice.

“It is a stab in the back for those most vulnerable.”

What are the ‘loopholes’ in the COP28 deal?

Climate campaigners and vulnerable countries – those represented by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), most vocally – are unhappy with concessions to fossil fuel producers in the final text.

“Although the text mentions a transition away from fossil fuel energy systems in a just and equitable manner, the text is full of loopholes and false solutions on unproven and expensive technology like nuclear, abatement, carbon capture and storage, transitional fuels, etc.” says Mitzi Jonelle Tan, a climate justice activist from the Philippines.

“Transition fuels” are understood to include fossil gas – or ‘natural gas’, as it’s branded by industry PR.

Ugandan climate justice activist Vanessa Nakate also points to the inclusion of transition fuels and “fairytale tech like carbon capture and storage” in the “desperately weak deal [that] again leaves the Global South without the climate finance it needs.”

“The influence of 2000 fossil fuel lobbyists was clear to see in this process,” she adds in an Instagram post. “We cannot have another compromised COP again.”

“The pact was not designed to solve the climate crisis but rather it functioned as “an alibi” for world leaders to ignore global warming,” Greta told reporters last week.

“As long as we don’t treat the climate crisis as a crisis and as long as we keep lobby interests influencing these texts and these processes, we are not going to get anywhere,” she said.

Watch the video above to see a full statement from Greta Thunberg.

Video editor • Hannah Brown