COP28 wrapped on Wednesday with officials touting a pledge to triple the world’s renewable energy capacity by 2030. It even came twinned with a vow to double global energy-saving efforts over the same period.
Predictably, the promise came with some high-flying rhetoric.
COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber, the oil CEO helming the talks, claimed the goal “aligns more countries and companies around the North Star of keeping 1.5 degrees Celsius within reach than ever before,” referring to the Paris Agreement target for limiting global warming.
But are the flashy pledges as ambitious as they sound? POLITICO crunched the numbers and here’s what we found: While the renewable energy target is well within reach, progress on energy efficiency has been a lot slower.
Countries would need to cut their energy intensity — the amount of energy used per unit of GDP — at least twice as fast between 2023 and 2030 as they did in previous years, which calls for major investments and substantial changes in individual behavior.
To achieve the renewable target, countries will need to bet big on solar and wind. These two technologies are set to account for around 90 percent of new capacity additions, due to their increasing availability and decreasing costs.
Improving energy efficiency is a more complex challenge. It will require action on multiple fronts, from housing and construction to mobility and consumer behavior.
Progress has been unequal and largely concentrated in richer countries, which also tend to attract most of the private investment in green technology. Good headway has been made in some areas like the electrification of transport, while building renovation is lagging.
If world leaders are serious about these pledges, they’ll have to put their money where their mouth is (or convince private investors to do so) and mobilize nearly $30 trillion in green investment between now and 2030, with buildings and the industrial sector taking the lion’s share of these funds.
Pricey, perhaps, but still probably cheaper than environmental catastrophe.
Karl Mathiesen contributed reporting.