Feds Seeking Agreement With UN to Phase out Use of Unabated Fossil Fuels: Guilbeault

Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault lresponds to a question during a news conference, in Ottawa on June 14, 2023. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

The federal government is eyeing the possibility of making this year’s COP28 climate-change conference the first ever to “acknowledge the need” for U.N. countries to completely phase out their use of unabated fossil fuels, says Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault.

“For COP28, we need to identify every possible opportunity to increase our collective ambition and update our climate and environmental commitments,” Mr. Guilbeault told reporters during a virtual press conference on July 14.

“We can make COP28 the first to acknowledge the need to phase out unabated fossil fuels,” he added. “We can operationalize a loss and damage fund that responds to those most vulnerable to climate impacts.”

The Canada Energy Regulator defines unabated fossil fuels as those that use “combustion without the application of carbon capture and storage technology.”

In December 2022 at COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson signed a “Statement on International Public Support for the Clean Energy Transition” that ended “new support for the international unabated fossil fuel energy sector by the end of 2022.”

The agreement, which Mr. Wilkinson signed alongside 38 other countries and institutions, said that Canada would meet a number of new guidelines including a halt to all direct public funding for “international unabated fossil fuel investments.”

However, Mr. Guilbeault said on July 14 that Canada and other countries need to move faster on a number of their climate commitments.

“We need to accelerate a number of things that we said we would do, but we need to make them happen faster,” he said. “The elimination of the unabated fossil fuel is something that the G7 countries were able to agree to just a few months ago.”

“I’m hopeful that for the first time ever at a COP ... we will collectively be able to agree on that as well. It never happened before. We got close to it last time.”

Mr. Guilbeault was speaking to reporters as a follow-up to his announcement on July 12 that Canada will be committing $450 million toward the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund, intended to help developing countries establish their own “clean energy transitions and climate-resilient sustainable development.”

Canada has now allocated over $600 million toward the fund.

“We need more money, and we need more money from all sources,” Mr. Guilbeault said after the announcement.