Design investigation with Ximena Valenzuela and Eloïse Lobmeyr.
Nov-Dec 2024.
COP28
Amidst the hottest year on record, COP28 set a historic precedent by being the first COP summit to explicitly call for a shift away from fossil fuels, known as the UAE Consensus; 200 countries have agreed to call for the reduction of carbon emissions caused by fossil fuels and increasing the amount of renewable energy production capacity. 22 countries also agreed to significantly ramp up their nuclear power capacity, tripling it by 2050. However, COP28 faced significant criticism for the UAE’s conflict of interest hosting the summit while being one of the world’s leading fossil fuel exporters and even conducting business deals under the auspices of the chairman of ADNOC (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company), who presided over COP28, as well as not pushing for stronger language and commitments to fossil fuel elimination. This project is a pre-cursor analysis of trends in global energy production in the lead-up to COP29, to better understand the reality of the sector and how to move forward.
SCOPE OF RESEARCH/ANALYSIS
We have looked at global energy production changes between 1990 and 2022, focusing on the trends in the following countries: UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Brunei, Sweden, Iceland, Germany, France, USA, Canada, Australia, Japan, and South Korea.
TRENDS
Some of the trends we noted included the reduction in reliance on nuclear energy in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant disaster in 2011, the financial crises of 1997 in East Asia and the worldwide ones in 2008 and 2020, the diversification of energy sources (or the lack thereof), wars and major conflicts such as the Ukraine-Russia War or the Gulf War, and finally increasing success in the renewable energy sector.