35-by-35: A catchy slogan, a mammoth negotiation and a plan to save the world

Energy Minister Chris Bowen will arrive in Turkey to run the world’s most complicated annual diplomatic showdown, the United Nations climate talks, with a detailed plan in his back pocket and a powerful friend by his side.In the hopes of sidestepping a bitter fight, Bowen and conference president Turkish Climate Minister Murat Kurum will call on more than 190 nations at COP31 to rapidly ramp up electrification rather than focus on fossil fuels.Championing their cause will be Dr Fatih Birol, the chief of the International Energy Agency, a man known well to most of the world’s leaders, and one who has twice been named by Time as one of the 100 most powerful people on earth.Despite the controversy Bowen has attracted in Australia in prosecuting the case for renewables, Birol – a man famous for both a laser focus on data and for deft diplomacy – says Bowen is the right man for the task ahead.International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol says oil and gas companies may have misjudged the market.Flavio Brancaleone“He is an intelligent man with a lot of integrity. I have been working shoulder to shoulder with him. Chris is the best man, in my view, to run these negotiations.”Maybe. But Bowen could still be walking into a diplomatic bandsaw. He wrestled the role of chair of negotiations from Turkey when Australia lost its bid to host this year’s talks, but his leadership role could not be coming at a more fraught moment.In September, the United Nations finally acknowledged that the world had missed its chance to hold warming to 1.5 degrees. Now the UN’s most optimistic scenario sees warming crash through 1.5 degrees by the end of the decade, warm to 1.8 degrees later this century and before – if we are lucky – we are able to force down emissions and stabilise the climate over centuries to come.“This is by no means an acceptable or preferred pathway; it is simply the best remaining option,” said the report, in uncharacteristically blunt language for a UN scientific report. “Avoiding every additional fraction of a degree of global warming and reducing the time in overshoot decreases risks and damages and increases the chances of bringing temperatures back down.”The horrific implications of this global failure will overshadow the coming talks. “This is the first COP where it is clear beyond reasonable doubt that the world will overshoot the 1.5-degree target,” Kurum said this week. “We will not look away, and we will not lower our ambition. The 1.5-degree target remains our compass, and our duty is to do everything in our power to return to it. In Antalya, we must start to respond to the new realities of overshoot.”But well before the UN acknowledged the truth, the COP process was faltering. The United States has entirely abandoned it. At the last meeting in Brazil it became clear that trust between developing and wealthy nations, which have for years failed to deliver promised climate finance, has withered.Turkey’s Environment and Climate Change Minister and COP31 president Murat Kurum.BloombergThe consensus that emerged from the COP in Glasgow, where major oil producers declared themselves to be in transition to rebirth as “integrated energy companies” collapsed when it became clear that the Trump administration would punish companies it suspected of what it called “wokism”.With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the US and Israeli attack on Iran, the world became desperate for any energy and fossil fuel extraction – and the profits of energy companies that had abandoned their climate pieties surged.Resentment has grown among some climate activists – and sceptics for that matter – about the sheer scale of the event. “How many people were at the last COP; 70,000, 80,000 people?” one former UN staffer asked last month. “I can’t get my head around why that many people need to be there. I call them climate narcissists. They show up to do a LinkedIn post or an Instagram post. Do they actually need to be there?”Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry has taken to using the COP as something like a trade fair, sending its lobbyists along to stall negotiations and its executives to cut deals. One in 25 of those who attended the Brazil meeting worked for the fossil fuel industry.Across the world – and in Australia – growing right-wing populist movements began demanding the scrapping of climate targets, wrongly blaming them for surging energy crises and aping the language of Trump’s MAGA movement.Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks to Turkey’s Environment and Climate Change Minister and COP31 president Murat Kurum at the Pre-COP31 meeting in Nadi, Fiji, last month. Getty ImagesIn this context, as COP preparations began in Ankara and Canberra this year, it became clear that the talks could fail spectacularly.Since the Paris accord itself was signed in 2016, the annual COP meetings – the conference of the parties to the Paris treaty – have been grinding diplomatic wrestling matches over frameworks and rule books, finance mechanisms and pledges. This process has seen achievements, but the COP meetings that have been welcomed as successes, conferring diplomatic prestige on their hosts, have been those where broader agreements are forged alongside the diplomatic grunt work.In Glasgow, coal was targeted explicitly for the first time. In Dubai, this was broadened again with an agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels. So what would be this year’s signal achievement? What could more than 190 nations with wildly different interests and capacities possibly agree on that would advance the climate effort? Bowen and Kurum turned to Birol.Birol, who is based in Paris at the IEA headquarters but is Turkish, might seem an odd climate champion. After training as an economist, he worked for the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Nations, an oil cartel, before moving on to the International Energy Agency, the international body designed to provide member nations advice on keeping fossil fuels flowing freely.But in his decade leading the IEA, he has used his organisation’s massive capacity to analyse global energy markets and its authority to make the case that the transition to renewables is both possible and necessary.It was the IEA’s blockbuster annual report World Energy Outlook that declared in 2020 that solar was the cheapest form of energy in history, and it was the IEA that reported that global renewable energy generation would finally overtake coal-fired output this year.In this vein, and with Birol’s support, the COP leaders decided that electrification would be their cause.“I first visited President [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan in Turkey, and just a few days later, Prime Minister [Anthony] Albanese in Canberra, and they and their government appointed IEA as the strategic partner,” Birol said in an interview this week. “I told both of them that I have been to many COP meetings. After the meeting finishes, what describes a COP successful or a not successful one?“I told both of them there are many criteria but for me, at the end of the day, it is down to two things: one, [the] number of governments and heads of state that come to the COP meeting. And the second one is [if there is] a concrete decision coming which enjoys the confirmation of several countries.”This year’s climate talks will focus on electricity.Luis Enrique AscuiBirol made the case that, if the world directed more efforts and finance into electrification, it would have the same climate impact as pursuing fossil fuel reduction agreements, but potentially sidestep a fight with oil producers.Bowen agrees. “It occurred to us early that electrification is the obvious next frontier. It’s one thing that the COP hasn’t focused on. It has agreed to double energy efficiency and triple renewable energy but, you know, all that is good and important and vital. But unless you’re electrifying, we have no chance of holding the world to 1.5 degrees.”He seems reluctant to be drawn on the tactical advantage of sidestepping an oil brawl at COP, but concedes, “It’s the positive side of the coin, if you like, it’s a positive way of saying what needs to happen.”The COP leadership commissioned the IEA to evaluate the feasibility and impact of a goal for the world to make 35 per cent of its energy consumption electric by 2035. It found that, by using existing technologies, electricity could cost-effectively meet 33 per cent by that date, up from 23 per cent today, putting 35 per cent within reach with emerging technologies.The COP had its slogan – 35 by 35.This would not just mean electrifying cars, but heating and cooling machines and larger vehicles. The benefits, according to the IEA, would be various and compounding. Because electric engines do not waste energy in heat and noise, less energy than is provided by fossil fuels would be needed to replace them. Particulate pollution would fall, and in a world that’s been jarred by supply crises, energy sovereignty and national security would improve.Should the targets be reached, the IEA estimates that oil importing countries would collectively save between $US400 billion and $US500 billion a year, with 18 million fewer barrels of oil a day consumed globally. Paired with a parallel shift towards clean power generation, it would reduce the global energy sector’s emissions by half, avoiding two gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions each year.Nonetheless, Birol acknowledges the 35-by-35 proposal will face serious opposition.“If this electrification target is met or agreed, the main implication will be reducing oil demand because the main implication will be on the transportation sector, and it will be a key.“There are countries who have some interest to not see the oil demand going down. Geopolitics has a long and dark shadow on energy.”It would also cost the world a cool trillion US dollars in new gear.Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen knows how fraught climate negotiations can become.Louie DouvisBowen’s standing at the COP may also be challenged by Australia’s perceived hypocrisy in championing climate action while remaining the world’s third-largest fossil fuel exporter. Even as Bowen prepared to leave for Turkey this week, a group of 500 climate scientists and experts distributed an open letter to Albanese, saying Australia “cannot credibly lead on climate abroad nor ensure national nor regional security while it expands coal and gas at home”.And while he would like to keep the electrification plan at the forefront, many attendees will be demanding action on climate finance and for commitments on cutting fossil fuels.He has seen how ferocious diplomacy can become on a COP plenary floor, observing that, at many international forums, all the agreements have been sealed before the first speech of welcome is made.“A COP just doesn’t work like that. A COP is a real, genuine negotiation down to the wire. Ministers in rooms all night. It’s not a set piece. It’s not a symbolic thing. It is a real negotiation.”Birol believes the pledge will survive in some form, and believes Australia is well-placed to lead negotiations. Australia’s fossil exports should not preclude it from leading climate talks, he says, arguing it has a responsibility to help its energy customers maintain their grids while it prosecutes the case for transition.In fighting climate change, he says, “I would feel much better if there were not one, but at least five Australias in this world.”Get to the heart of what’s happening with climate change and the environment. Sign up for our fortnightly Environment newsletter.