ECO likes a nice balanced meal. That’s something anyone could enjoy. But ECO will NOT sign up for eating a dead rat. And yesterday’s launch of the ‘Global Decarbonisation Accelerator’ was a nasty sandwich that had ECO gagging.
There was some solid, fluffy bread, and a lot of nice words – and a delicious morsel in the shape of a pledge to triple renewable energy and double energy efficiency. Delicious! If that was where the cooks had left the sandwich, ECO would have feasted with relish.
The trouble is, there were too many cooks in the kitchen. Someone invited oil and gas industry CEOs to join in the cooking, and they served up a dead rat right in the middle of the sandwich: a greenwashing pledge from oil and gas companies, full of recycled pledges, none of which address the emissions from the oil and gas they sell being burned. An energy sandwich without SCOPE 3? Not for ECO. And on the side, they piled up a dish of cheeky carbon capture and storage.
ECO didn’t come to this restaurant for a meal like that. ECO came for a healthy negotiated agreement consisting of a comprehensive energy package, including renewable energy, finance, protections for communities and nature, and a full, fast, fair, funded phase out of all fossil fuels. Will the negotiators put that on the table at COP28?