By David Wojick
It started out as the vague idea of building roadmaps for countries to use to phase out fossil fuel use. It was a spin-off from last year’s COP 30, run by people who decided the UN climate process was ineffective (which is true).
See my “Hatching a fossil fuel phase-out treaty” here.
But after their first international conference they now have a full scale global program with a second annual meeting planned. The roadmaps are still there but they are just part of the bigger show, which may rival the annual UN COPs.
The first meeting was co-hosted by Colombia and The Netherlands, while the second will be by Tuvalu and Ireland. That is one developing and one developed country, a common UN feature.
The program now has a friendly acronym — TAFF. Easy to say and remember while 3 Fs would have been difficult so they dropped “from.”
The first conference has a suitably long 176-page report with the uninspired title “Report — 1st Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels — June 2026″ here.
As a kickoff meeting with 57 countries attending plus numerous other “stakeholders,” there were lots of speeches and the Report has many quotes from them. Beyond the speeches, the Report is very action oriented. It mostly consists of five “pathways,” each containing from one to four “actions.” It is still vague, but at least they look like actions.
By far the longest pathway in terms of text is the 42-page pathway three on roadmaps. Here is the text along with the actions:
“Pathway 3: Develop or strengthen national and regional roadmaps to transition away from fossil fuels.
Action 3.1 Design, planning, and implementation of science- and rights-based roadmaps for a socio-economic and energy transition and just workforce development, anchored in sustained economic diversification and new value chains
Action 3.2: Switching fossil fuels for clean energy, energy security, and sovereignty
Action 3.3. Access to clean energy for rural, remote, and marginalized communities
Action 3.4. Plan the phase down and definitive closure of fossil fuel extraction”
The usual green fantasy given that something like 80% of global energy production is from fossil fuels.
Action 3.4 may be a serious confusion since fossil fuel extraction includes huge feedstocks for petrochemicals not just for energy. Vast quantities of consumer and industrial products require these fossil fuel chemicals, from clothing to fertilizers. The section text makes no mention of petrochemicals or their products, just energy.
There is also the obvious need for huge amounts of money. This is touched on briefly in the fourth Pathway:
“Pathway 4: Overcoming fossil fuel-related macroeconomic dependencies, scaling up transition investment, and addressing barriers in the international and domestic financial architecture”
The conference was really about roadmaps, which attendees would no doubt say must come before financing the transition.
It will certainly be worth watching as countries struggle to map their way to an impossible future. Mind you these are professional diplomats who know how to talk about doing impossible things as though they were real. Plus doing the maps may well be a path to some funding just to do them with. Funding the maps seems not to have been discussed.
What is really worth watching in the short run is how the UN handles this and several other splinter groups at November’s COP31.
For example, there is a separate Fossil Fuel Phaseout Treaty organization here.
I am sure the UN would like to absorb these radical groups that threaten to compete with them for attention and funding. Inviting then to speak at COP31 might be a start, but will they come and what would they say?
Stay tuned to CFACT as this near-term drama unfolds.
What’s a fossil fuel? Am I to believe dead ferns turned into oil all over the planet? You need to change the vernacular – oil is ‘created’ way down there (thousands of feet) every single second
Even if true it is the word used which I cannot change.
A fossil fuel is the remains of plant (coal and some methane0 life or the bodies of many small animals like plankton (oil) that have been subject to pressure heat and deep burial over millenia
Whilst its true to say that oil is still being created, its a very ‘Libral’ thing to say – all airy fairy binary logic with no numbers
It may at best be being created at 0.01% the rate at which it is extracted.
Oil and coal will never truly run out, but they will end up more expensive than alternatives.
E.g. A recent article suggested that container ship operators are seriously considering nuclear power because even bunker oil – the turd left over after oil distillation is complete – is simply more expensive than running a reactor would be.
Nah. It’s dead dinos.
The “Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels” project has become a global program
Global? Hell no!
China, India, Russia, US, South America and Africa are using MORE fossil fuels year after year.
In 2025, about 80% of the world’s primary energy for all purposes was from fossil fuel, with most of the rest from Hydro and Nuclear, with tiny percentages from wind, solar, etc.
It turns out the 80% number has been nearly unchanged for at least 40 years.
The “Global Program” is a busy-body-report-producing project for scare-mongering and fund-raising purposes.
Almost all wood could be thought of as being fuel which is not fossil, using garbage or waste similarly and whale oil, biogas and hydrogen from various sources likewise.
The only fuel which might vaguely be questioned by a smartarse contrarian is peat. How deep down the peat bog can we argue as being fossil.
My acronym for it: LAFF. Losers Afraid of Fossil Fuels.
Great. Pronounced “laugh”.
Let’s try this:
TaWFF — Turn a–Way* [from] Fossil-Foolz
Pronounced (in best southern-tejano dialect) like the word ‘Tough’,
plural: ‘tuffs’ or ‘The Toughies[z]’
Example:
“Aw, that be tawff luck, sonny-boy”,
is what you say when his PV$-whirly-thingee crashes-&-burns on the roof of his caddy-shack.
Just don’t leave out the ‘lambda’ part of ‘luck’, or you’re left with ‘Tauph-Uck’ troubles.
*Lest you doubt that A–Way is a compound (two words), try listening to Elvis Presley’s rendition of ‘Dixie’ — “Oh Turn-A-Way, Dixie-Land !’ ‘A ways off’ [meaning ‘distant’] is the vernacular we’re dealing with, baby. It’s not just a concept.
P.S. As to the eternally vexing question, why-oh-why are we stuck referring to mineral hydrocarbons as ‘fossil fuels’ — well, the L.A. County Museum (aka La Brea Tar-Pits) has preserved the whole story for the skool-kidz (just like us), in (2) brief portions; first:
‘Lemme tell you a story, [it’s] ’bout a man called Jed [Jedediah] –
[he was a] Poor mountaineer, [he] barely kept his family fed !
Then one day he was shooting at some food,
[when] up thru the ground came a-Bubblin’-Crude —
Awl [oil] that is: ‘Black Gold’ — ‘Texas Tea’.
Well, next thing ya know Ol’ Jed’s a Millionaire [100x – over],
[His] kin-folk said ‘Jed, Move A-Way[s]-From-There !
They said ‘Californee-is-the-place-yah-oughtta-be’ !
So he packed up his bags [clan] & moved t’Beverly – …
– Hills, that is — Swimmin’ Pools … Movie Stars …
[And so on & so forth, etc, usw, ad infinitum. Cf. J. Clampett Museum archives]
———————
Now, says y’all, that’s the [w]ho-ohl’ Awl [Oil] Story? Where be them Fossils?
Well, according to legend (archival photos), there worked, in those infamous Pits [brews-brines, o en Español ‘La Brea’] of the L.A. Basin, the many poor servants of the pioneers of Beverly Hills; their mule-teams would be digging in (& dragging from) the muck-&-mire, and occasionally pull up a big chunk of solid, affording them an amusement break, as they tugged at it & soap-rinsed it clean.
Now, no one there could now what it was, nor should they care too much, until — because where would we ever be without Experts — a roaming Yankee or European accredited Geologist, who happened by during his stroll thru the citrus groves, and he would stop & say, ‘Boys [meaning ‘Men’, but that’s how the leisured class addressed the grown-working-crews of yore.] —
— ‘Step aside & let me In-Spect your (ahem) Finding! Oh .. say, that e-Spec-i-men reminds me somewhat of a wooly mammoth / saber-toothed tiger – terrible lizard Fossil that my colleague Herr Prof. Dr. Findelmeister hath pulled out of a glacial moraine in the Swiss Alps awhile back. This e-Spess-í-Miento deserves some further In-vest-i-gaciones in a proper La-Bor-a-Tori-um.’
To which the workers, including impatient foremen, replied [extraneous expletives deleted]:
‘What’d He Say? What-in-damnaeshun is he talking about?’
Hereabouts, the clock-watching foreman saw his opportunity to close out this diversion from the business-at-hand, which was [checking notes] ‘Oil-Extraction-&-Processing-for-Transport-Fuel’. By offering den wanderlüstigen Roads-Scholar a few silver dollars to haul the worthless specimen off… in order to document & elaborate in all suitable formats his proprietary landmark-epochal Erfindung … which ultimately found its way into the Staatlicher Gawkers Museum of crazy König-Leopold(XVII)-v-Oberbayern (syn., that translates, into vulgar-Amerikanisch, as ‘Oz, Emperor of Ozymandium’, the latter being that place designated queraus dem deutsches-sprachraum as ‘Das Heiliges Heimat der Münchnern / Munch-Kin-Völker).
But, returning to the workers’ lamentable state — ‘then what should we say happened, to explain the lost hour, to the boss (owners) of the fuel-extraction-operation?
Foreman: Just say “them fossils were stuck down in the fuel, a-slowin’ down the work!”
And the men all laughed & returned to work, shouting mockery —
‘Fossil-Fuels, we’d be Fossil-Fools, We are Merrymen, indeed’ — or some such ditty, lost to posterity [that’s us, folks], bc. full of scatological & porno reference material to make it memorable.
And that’s, the Whole Truth of the Matter, so help [us] Zeus!
—————
A flippin’ sesquicentennial later, here we be — still letting ‘Hollywood’ [‘Hills’, that is] & its Movie-Stars tell us how to tell the Tales. We’re truly Stuck-in-the-Moment-[cain’t get out-of-it / the]-Muck-&-Mire with the oxymoronic ‘Fossil Fuels’ & assorted Fools.
post-P.S. And, for a slightly more respectable account of the whole matter, please do consult Tommy Gold‘s ‘Deep Hot Biosphere‘. Freeman Dyson, inter alia, recommends him (& the book) most highly.
Let me guess, more private jets, more countries asking the West for handouts and eventually nothing actually gets done.
Let’s hope so because this is far more dangerous than the UN plodding along.
Plans? We don’t need no stinking plans!
Reminds me of Ross Perot who stated we did not need another economic plan, that there many plans already and all that was needed was to pick one and implement it.
At least no U.S. taxpayer money is going to funding this new bureaucracy.
Not now but a Dem Pres might. However very few fossil fuel producing countries attended.
COP
One definition is to grab or take.
Sounds right. 🙂
As in “he copped it right on his snozz” ?
Simple, just mandate the use of dispatchable, emissions-free resources (DEFRs), like the New York State plan. Problem solved!
Examples?
(Nuclear is the only one I can think of when “dispatchable” is a key criterion.)
Even nuclear is not fast acting in response to demand. Gas or hydro is generally needed.
There are some interesting bolt ons to nuclear like having a massive thermal store of e.g. molten salt that can be tapped to increase short term peak power.
Nuclear used in ships and subs must be fast-acting.
Not especially. Remember a boiler full of superheated steam is in itself a heat store that can be tapped fast.
But ship response times are in any case pretty slow. It takes a lot of minutes to get a tanker or container ship up to speed and many many more to stop it.
AFAICT it takes a day to get a reactor up to temperature, and then an hour to get ready to deliver propulsion power.
But you can go from slow ahead to flank in about 5 minutes. Quite a lot of efficiency is lost building reactors that react that quickly
The SMR described here a couple days ago at least had “dispatchable” in the name of the manufacturer.
Up to a point yes, all nuclear is ‘dispatchable’ to some extent BUT the cost of doing so is actually higher than running flat out, so nuclear operators are always the last to leave when the spot price does down.
Its an economic hurdle that needs to be addressed as more nuclear comes online
The bottom line is that providing dispatch costs money and the more intermittent renewables you have the more it costs
Sorry, forgot the /sarc tag
Don’t apologize for others being dense. That is one of the routes which brought us into all this crap.
You really don’t get sarcasm, do you?
Mandating that they are emission free is stupid, and achieves absolutely nothing.
Anyway, the Earth’s biosphere needs more CO2, not less.
(pretty sure yours was a tongue-in-cheek comment)
Your first sentence is the very definition of Kathy Hochul and the Democrat Party.
“Beyond the speeches, the Report is very action oriented. “
All I can see are plans, plans and more plans.
But why do they have to have international conferences. What is to stop any government which wants to kill off its economy going ahead and doing that? You don’t need the permission of other governments. You just do it. The international conferences are just ways of postponing having to actually do anything.
That, yes,, and also luxury vacations at tax payer expense.
The ideas is to kill off all economies together in order not to allow a competitive advantage.
The reality is that behind the scenes people in boardrooms and other places are already talking about what to do when e.g. gasoline is $10 a gallon …
e,g. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/action-needed-to-achieve-tripling-of-global-nuclear-capacity-target-says-nea
But no one is shouting this from the rooftops as the US political arena has been deliberately transformed into a battlefield between ‘renewables’ and ‘fossil’ neatly along party lines.
Which since both are doomed to failure ultimately is pretty much a bellweather of the state of the nation…
“What is to stop any government which wants to kill off its economy going ahead and doing that? “
UK, Australia, EU….. some countries are doing it…and killing off their economies.
International conferences are simply a path to booze and hoes, nothing more.
For reasons unconnected with climate, it has to happen. Fossil fuels are being burnt faster than they are being made.
We have to transition to a mainly nuclear powered society and that is not a trivial exercise.
I wrote something many years ago outlining what I thought were the chief obstacles
( http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/Beyond_Fossil_Fuels.pdf )
The site is old and is not encrypted, but its safe enough.
It may be of some interest
It assumes that the renewable energy scam will have been exposed and no longer relevant of course
Oh dear. The truth is getting downvoted .
Just like being called a ‘climate denier’ all over again, now I am a ‘fossil denier’
Wrong. Simply wrong.
Action 3.2: Switching fossil fuels for clean energy, energy security, and sovereignty..
Firstly, wind and solar are filthy, chemical intensive and highly polluting manufacturing industries, apart from being environmentally destructive at all stages of implementation, use and disposal. Far from “clean”. Modern coal and oil are far cleaner.
Secondly, wind and solar cannot ever provide energy security.
Thirdly, sovereignty comes from using your own or a friendly nation’s resources, such as oil, coal, gas, and not relying on useless supplies of part-time-energy production junk from China.
Error 4th line … Modern coal and
oilgas are far cleaner.For crying out loud, clean CLEAN is a weasel-word!
It is fake, a propaganda tool, it is combining the visual appearance of carbon as in coal, black or soot, with the colourless, odourless gas carbon dioxide as a deliberate propaganda ploy. A psyop
Nobody of integrity on WUWT should pander to the propaganda and make any argument about fuels or sources of energy being Clean or Dirty.
Yes, I should have put “cleaner” in inverted commas.
I was just pointing out that over their life times, coal and gas are far “cleaner” and produce far less real pollution, and are far less detrimental to the environment, than wind and solar are.
You haven’t lived in a country run 80% on coal have you? With no sulphur scrubbers…and no exhaust catalysts at all and asbestos brake dust on every street just to add flavour to the partially burnt hydrocarbons, oil carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides.
It was fun, but no way was it ‘clean’
Action 3.3. Access to clean energy for rural, remote, and marginalized communities..
Wind and solar are not clean energy. You marginalize any community that has to rely on them.
——
Action 3.4. Plan the phase down and definitive closure of fossil fuel extraction.
The utter stupidity of this “Action” is hard to put into words that could be printed here.
You can’t make solar or wind junk without using fossil fuels.
Action 3.1 Design, planning, and implementation of science- and rights-based roadmaps for a socio-economic and energy transition and just workforce development, anchored in sustained economic diversification and new value chains.
MEANINGLESS BLATHER. !
“Mind you these are professional diplomats who know how to talk about doing impossible things as though they were real.” In a nutshell.
We should strive to believe at least six impossible things before breakfast.
More gibberish from the other side.
It seems to me that we’ve been supposedly transitioning away from fossil fuels for about three decades now Yet some 87% of global energy is still generated by oil, coal and natural gas, and most predictions claim these will continue for at least several decades yet, So the transition would be more aptly described as just another green pipe dream.
This is true, but what is also true is that we have to continue. Not fore reasons of climate, but reasons of resource cost.
How’s yer pump fuel price these days since yer axshul Donald has fucked up the straits of Hormuz?
I don’t blame Trump for fighting against the madmen in Iran that have declared war against anyone that doesn’t embrace their death cult ideology. That fight should have occurred during the Reagan administration and/or administrations since.
To blame Trump for something that should have happened decades ago is disingenuous at best.
Just be glad he doesn’t declare our oil and refineries as national security assets and leave the area to be dealt with by other governments. Or he could turn the middle east sand into glass. Instead, he’s trying to eliminate the mad mullahs without killing off most of the innocent civilians that have had to live repressed for decades.
I expect gas prices will be irrelevant if one of the mullahs detonates a nuke.
And yet more examples of suicidal stupidity.