An agreement has been reached at Cop 28 that includes a commitment to phasing out the use of fossil fuels, with some hailing it as an historic moment in the struggle to mitigate climate change.
But an agreement is not a substitute for action, and the action required to achieve Net Zero by 2050 amounts to one of the most fundamental changes in all human history.
Geographic realities, such as the availability of materials vital to building green energy infrastructure, will help some regions overcome the problem more easily than others.
And as states each take different courses to secure their energy into the future, new new geopolitical alliances and tensions will be created.
Matt Williams: Take a deep breath and see how Sam Prendergast copes with big Fiji test
New Irish citizens: ‘I hear the racist and xenophobic slurs on the streets. Everything is blamed on immigrants’
Jack Reynor: ‘We were in two minds between eloping or going the whole hog but we got married in Wicklow with about 220 people’
‘I could have gone to California. At this rate, I probably would have raised about half a billion dollars’
On the level of domestic politics, the hard challenges of selling measures that curb access to cheap fossil fuel energy will not be solved by climate conference agreements.
To discuss all this Helen Thompson, a professor of political economy at Cambridge and an expert in the politics of energy, is today’s guest on the Inside Politics podcast with Hugh Linehan.
Sign up for Politics push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
