Lego, fossil fuels and the COP28 climate deal: What toy bricks tell us about the immense difficulties of going green
The last-minute deal agreed at the COP28 summit in Dubai to move away from fossil fuels is being heralded as a major breakthrough.
But while it’s the first time these annual climate negotiations have agreed to reduce our reliance on coal, oil and gas, it stops short of what many campaigners had been demanding: a promise to phase out fossil fuel use altogether.
Which raises a question: Why?
Why couldn’t the meeting go one step further and promise to leave all fossil fuels in the ground?
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Applause for ‘historic’ COP28 deal
Perhaps the best answer begins somewhere unexpected: with a piece of Lego.
Most Lego bricks are made of a plastic called Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene, or ABS for short. It’s a tough thermoplastic, which is to say one of those plastics you can melt down and form back into other shapes again, and it’s brilliant at doing all the things Lego bricks need to do.
It’s incredibly durable. It can be moulded precisely, with tolerances of within four microns, meaning one brick fits neatly into another.
Finally, it has pretty unbeatable “clutch power”, as the company calls it: the bricks stick together robustly but are also pretty easy to pull apart.
But ABS is made, like nearly all plastics, out of chemicals derived from oil and gas.
A few years ago Lego committed to trying to make its blocks not directly from oil but from other feedstocks.
After much investigation it experimented with using old plastic bottles – or recycled polyethylene terephthalate (RPET), to use the technical term.
But, try as it might, it struggled to make this RPET work as well as ABS. The only way to make it perform as well as the old brick – the rigidity, the accuracy, the “clutch” – was to process it and reprocess it, adding a host of additional materials along the way.
A few months ago, it revealed that in practical terms those efforts – thus far – had failed. Ironically enough, it took more energy to turn those recycled bottles into bricks than it did to take oil and turn it into bricks.
Fossil fuels are hard to beat
Now, it’s still relatively early days. But Lego’s efforts are a pretty good reminder of something pretty profound. Like it or not, fossil fuels are remarkably good at what they do.
We use them in vast quantities because they are a brilliant source of energy and a brilliant source of chemicals.
Coal, demonised as it may be these days, isn’t just good at firing up power stations; it’s also nearly unbeatable (in its coked form) at helping you turn certain ores into metals.
The good news – from a carbon cutting perspective – is that we’re getting better and better at finding alternatives to most of the things fossil fuels do.
Electric cars are in many ways better than the petrol cars they’re replacing. Wind and solar panels are very good at generating electricity – though we’re still working on reliable, affordable and green ways to back up the grid when the wind’s not blowing.
But for certain purposes – purposes far more serious than some toy building blocks – it’s still very hard to beat fossil fuels.
We still rely on natural gas for most of the world’s nitrogen fertiliser production, without which half of the world would starve.
We still have yet to find a way of mass producing concrete without spewing a lot of carbon dioxide into the air. And making plastics without oil is, as Lego learnt to its cost, tricky, to say the least.
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Now, there are very smart people working on all of the above and there are really promising green candidates for many of these tricky fossil fuel products.
But many remain at the prototype stage, a very long way from being able to compete on a level playing field with their industrial counterparts.
The upshot is that even the most ambitious plans for how we might reduce global carbon emissions still assume we’ll be using fossil fuels come 2050 – and potentially into the foreseeable future beyond that too.
Even optimistic plans admit we’ll need some fossil fuels
Take the International Energy Agency (IEA) Net Zero by 2050 plan.
This framework has all the green credentials – indeed it’s often cited approvingly by organisations like Just Stop Oil, since its models suggest there’s no need for further oil and gas exploration.
But even this plan still assumes we’ll be getting more than a fifth of our energy from fossil fuels (mostly oil and gas) come 2050.
Now it’s worth saying, about a third of those 2050-vintage fossil fuels are not being burnt, but are instead being turned into products like plastics (including Lego bricks, if they haven’t cracked it by then).
Which is an important distinction because they won’t be responsible for the carbon emissions we’re really concerned with.
But that still leaves a lot of fossil fuels being burnt – a lot of them in the engines of planes (sustainable aviation fuel will only get us so far, thinks the IEA) and some to do all those other tricky things like making fertilisers and so on.
And here’s the key thing, the thing one can’t emphasise enough: this is not a conservative plan. This is about the most optimistic plan you’ll find among policymakers today (that doesn’t involve drastic changes in living standards).
But even this plan for net zero depends on a large chunk of fossil fuels being burnt.
Some of the emissions, reckons the IEA, can be captured and squirrelled away underground (“carbon capture and storage” or CCS as it’s called) – though it’s worth saying CCS is one of those technologies that’s still barely been carried out at large scale.
But even after you subtract that, there’s still a not unsubstantial amount of unabated fossil fuel burning going on.
Even in 2050. Even in the most optimistic of all likely pathways.
And here’s the other thing you need to know. We’re already falling far short of that pathway.
Right now our oil production is way, way above where that IEA pathway said it should be.
Reasons for hope
Global carbon emissions are now so far beyond where they should be heading if we wanted to keep global warming below the 1.5C threshold most campaigners are pushing for.
Indeed, a glance at the statistics suggests that that goal is now incredibly unlikely – some would say impossible.
Yet for all of this, there’s plenty of reasons for hope.
Overall emissions may be higher than we’d like them to be, but by the same token they’re considerably lower than they seemed to be heading back in 2015.
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Carbon emissions: The global picture
Thanks to technologies like wind turbines, batteries and solar panels, the world is getting better at generating clean energy quicker than expected.
The very scariest climate outcomes look much less likely today than they did a few years ago – according to the IPCC’s own analysis.
But the more we wrestle with the difficulties of the energy transition, the clearer it is how enormous the challenge ahead remains. And a forensic look at that challenge underlines why there’s a very big difference between pledging to “phase down” and to “phase OUT” fossil fuels.
The former is doable – and it’s pretty extraordinary it’s taken this long for COP ministers to commit to it.
Achieving the latter by 2050 while maintaining today’s levels of living standards is close to inconceivable.
The UK has sent the first failed asylum seeker to Rwanda under a voluntary scheme.
The scheme is for those who have gone through the asylum process and had permission rejected, rather than for migrants who have illegally entered Britain by crossing the Channel on small boats.
The migrant was sent on a commercial flight and handed a fee from the British taxpayer to help relocate under the terms of a deal with Rwanda.
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According to The Sun, the man of African origin claimed asylum in the UK but was rejected at the end of last year. He then accepted the offer to go to Rwanda.
He left the UK on Monday.
This was not done using the powers set out in the Safety of Rwanda Act, but rather a parallel scheme that allows someone to choose to make the trip if their attempts to claim asylum in the UK fails.
And upon arrival in Kigali, the person is able to claim around £3,000 in UK taxpayer money as help.
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Migrants ‘will be found and removed’
The development was criticised by both the Labour Party and Reform UK director Nigel Farage.
Yvette Cooper, Labour’s shadow home secretary, said: “The Tories are so desperate to get any flight off to Rwanda before the local elections that they have now just paid someone to go.
“British taxpayers aren’t just forking out £3,000 for a volunteer to board a plane, they are also paying Rwanda to provide him with free board and lodgings for the next five years. This extortionate pre-election gimmick is likely to be costing on average £2m per person.
“Former Tory Home Office ministers warned that the government’s plan was just to get token flights off before a General Election. Now we know what they mean.”
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Rwanda plan: ‘What does success mean?’
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Former UKIP leader Mr Farage said: “Don’t be conned by this new government spin on the Rwanda deal.
“This African man, who did not even cross the Channel, was refused asylum and has voluntarily accepted £3,000 and free board.
“It won’t stop the boats.”
The government’s attempts to forcefully remove people to Rwanda were announced more than two years ago, but no one has been sent so far.
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Earlier this month, parliament passed the Safety of Rwanda Act, and the government hopes to get flights off the ground in nine to 11 weeks.
A government spokesperson said: “We are now able to send asylum seekers to Rwanda under our migration and economic development partnership.
“This deal allows people with no immigration status in the UK to be relocated to a safe third country where they will be supported to rebuild.”
World
Israel-Hamas war: Rafah attack ‘on immediate horizon’, UN aid chief says, as Netanyahu reaffirms desire to launch offensive
An Israeli ground offensive in Rafah is “on the immediate horizon”, the UN’s aid chief has warned, as Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed that his forces “will enter” the southern Gaza city.
Martin Griffiths said in a statement on X on Tuesday the threatened attack would “spell even more trauma and death” for those in the city and “strike a disastrous blow” to the aid agencies trying to help them.
“Famine is taking hold. The rules of war continue to be flouted,” he said, adding that a ground operation in the city, where an estimated 1.5 million displaced Gaza Palestinians are sheltering, will be “a tragedy beyond words”.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed to states with influence over Israel “to do everything in their power” to prevent an Israeli assault on Rafah.
Their comments came as Mr Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, reaffirmed his intention to order a long-promised assault on the city, whatever the response by Hamas to the latest ceasefire proposals.
Mr Netanyahu said Israel would enter Rafah, which it says is Hamas’s last stronghold, regardless of whether a truce-for-hostages deal is struck.
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Israeli protesters light bonfire
In a statement from his office, he said: “The idea that we will stop the war before achieving all of its goals is out of the question. We will enter Rafah and we will eliminate Hamas’s battalions there – with or without a deal, to achieve the total victory.”
His comments appeared to be directed at his nationalist governing partners, who have pressured him not to accept a deal that might prevent an assault on the city.
Mr Netanyahu appeared to reassure one of them, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose office said the leader promised him “Israel will enter Rafah, we are not stopping the war and there won’t be a reckless deal”.
The US has repeatedly said it opposes the Rafah operation until Israel presents a credible plan for evacuating and protecting those in the city.
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Tear gas thrown at students
US secretary of state Antony Blinken, speaking in Jordan before flying to Israel, to help advance the latest round of ceasefire talks, urged Hamas to respond to Israel’s latest ceasefire plan, saying: “No more delays. No more excuses. The time to act is now.”
Negotiations aimed at freeing hostages, bringing relief to civilians and averting an Israeli offensive into Rafah appear to be gaining strength.
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The near seven-month conflict began when Hamas fighters killed around 1,200 people and took some 250 Israelis and foreigners hostage in their 7 October incursion into southern Israel.
It prompted Israel’s assault on Gaza, as it pledged to destroy Hamas and bring the hostages home.
More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed during the Israel-Hamas war, according to local health officials, who say about two-thirds of the dead are women and children.
It was a rare window into confrontations most have viewed from afar. We were invited on board the Philippine Coastguard Vessel BRP Bagacay.
They were on a resupply mission to Scarborough Shoal – a submerged reef which China claims as its own but is within the Philippines’ Exclusive Economic Zone.
They were meant to be dropping off food and fuel to fishermen who rely on the lives beneath these waters. But they knew, as did we, that this journey was about far more.
It felt as if they wanted to show the world they were willing to stand up to Beijing if Chinese ships tried to block their path.
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Confrontation in South China Sea
Our trip comes off the back of a trilateral summit with Japan and America, where no doubt there were discussions on how to handle China’s expanding interests and increasing manoeuvres in the South China Sea.
We got on the ship on Monday afternoon. By dawn the following day, the tension was already apparent.
Two ships were already trailing behind our vessel – more than three hours away from Scarborough Shoal.
There has long been a game of brinkmanship in this waterway – where about one-third of the world’s shipping passes through. But this felt more choreographed and intense than it has for some time.
The Philippine vessel was damaged as a result of water cannons
Soon, the captain told us 12 ships were encircling our vessel.
They swerved in front of the Philippine crew, who exchanged warnings over the radio.
On the deck, the crew rushed towards buoys every time the Chinese edged closer – trying to protect themselves in case there was a collision. We could see the Chinese crew taking pictures – just metres away from us.
Then suddenly, a volley of water was fired at the boat. The force of it seemed to take even the experienced crew on board by surprise.
12 vessels were surrounding the Philippine ship as it headed to Scarborough Shoal
We were on the stern of the vessel and got soaked. As we were ushered inside, the roof of part of the deck that some of us had spent the previous night sleeping on was ripped apart. Despite the damage, the water cannons continued to fire.
Within hours the Chinese coastguard was trying to get the first word out to the world about the incident.
They say the Philippine vessel we were on has been “expelled”.
The team on board the Philippine vessel tell us they’re turning back because the other ship they were travelling alongside has had its radar damaged by the water cannons.
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There is arguably one silent player in this fraught moment – America.
The US has recently deepened its military and diplomatic ties with the Philippines. It’s described China’s actions as “coercive and unlawful”.
It has also made clear that due to a joint defence treaty, it will take action if Beijing conducts a military attack.
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That’s raised the temperature of this tussle and the spectre of a superpower showdown.
No one wants that yet, but the chances of a dangerous misstep now look far higher.
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