“The more the impacts of warming become clearer, the more the barrage from oil tankers becomes stronger”

2023-12-10 05:30:05

COP28 is due to end on Tuesday December 12 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and no one yet knows precisely what might come out of it. One thing already seems certain: much more than the twenty-seven previous editions, it will have illustrated the incapacity of climate diplomacy to seriously hinder the progress of warming. Worse: beyond its outcome, the sequence of events which marked its preparation and its holding appear to the entire world as a dystopia scenario.

As we know, COP28 is being held under the presidency of Sultan Al-Jaber, Minister of Industry of the United Arab Emirates and boss of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), the Emirati national oil company. It is, more or less, as if a congress to fight lung cancer were chaired by a tobacco merchant.

The COP presidency seems to have been aware quite early of the uncomfortable nature of the situation. From the month of May, an investigation of Guardian and the Center for Climate Reporting showed that Sultan Al-Jaber’s team had maneuvered to modify entries in the Wikipedia encyclopedia, in order to “green” the image of the United Arab Emirates and its national oil company. A few days later, we learned, still in the British daily newspaperthat an armada of fake accounts were pushing, on the social network X, a narrative favorable to the presidency of the COP.

Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers COP28: carbon capture and storage, a major issue in the negotiations

“Greening” the image of COP28 was indeed necessary. In June, the Guardian revealed for example that its information system was hosted on Adnoc servers: the information exchanged by the participants at the summit was thus, technically, made accessible to the oil company.

At the beginning of November, Agence France-presse (AFP) indicated that the consulting firm McKinsey had graciously offered its assistance and services to the presidency of the COP, preparing it for “a transition plan that looks like it was written by the oil industry, for the oil industry”according to an analyst interviewed by AFP. Unsurprisingly, McKinsey also advises (but for a fee) BP, Chevron, Rio Tinto and other fossil giants.

Confusion between causes and effects

A few days later, finally, the BBC revealed that preparatory meetings for the COP had been used by its presidency – that is to say the management of Adnoc – for the purpose of prospecting new customers for Emirati natural gas. Reaching such heights, the confusion of genres becomes an art form.

You have 60% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.