Circularity after COP27

21 Nov 2022

When it comes to oil production, there are two ways for things to slow down and stop. Peak supply, when the cost to acquire new oil from smaller, more difficult, and more dangerous oil wells continues to rise - when there is literally just no more oil. Otherwise, there is peak demand, where global desire for more oil reduces before the world hits peak supply.

The agreement at COP27 each year has been an attempt to accelerate peak demand, to bring forward the day when demand for energy and production resources moves beyond oil.

Like every COP before, the result has been idealised and therefore underwhelming, as is the reality from coordinating a multi-lateral consortium of countries with differing energy demands, energy needs, and growth objectives.

What has been agreed are a large number of new financial and coordination instruments, most notably: the Indonesia Just Energy Transition Partnership (20B USD), the forest and climate leaders partnership, 105m USD for the global environmental facility funds for climate adaptation, global shield financing facility from the G7, new guide to Net Zero Pledges from the UN, 3.1B USD for early climate warning systems, and 25 new collaborative actions across power, transport, steel, hydrogen, and agriculture.

The devil will be in the details, and a first issue may need to be something like this: how do we ensure that the transition towards a sustainable world will itself be sustainable.

Consider three examples.

The major push towards battery operated commercial vehicles has driven an exposition of mining demand and unsustainable battery practices - what will happen to the millions of car batteries set to be retired?

Green production systems are going to be funded through the COP27 collaborative action plans, what are they going to be producing? The greening of production for a linear economy will continue to drive consumer waste.

New energy systems are being financed, such as green hydrogen, alternative energy with solar and wind. Are these systems being designed with future disassembly and material management in mind - or will they continue to drive long-term waste creation.

Construction waste will rise exceptionally as the world attempts to retrofit and design new infrastructure, new cities, to be climate resilient and climate adaptive - what will happen with the construction waste?

What will happen with the millions of cars set to be retired with the global transition away from Oil?

The current set of actors in position to lead the global "greening" of production, the global construction industry, will bring in much of the same unsustainable practices, uncoordinated waste planning, limited material and product life extension models, among other practices.

We DO need to transition to a different set of global problems - but right now, what the world is facilitating is the transition from high GHG based problems to high waste, material lock-in, and material pollution based problems, which will continue to drive GHG problems.

The question that needs to be more central is this: can we transition from the high GHG based problems without adding in the future material problems? Otherwise, early positive changes will drive and entrench deeper long-run environmental and socio-economic problems.

The world can do better.