2023-11-29 17:07:37
The climate conference opens its doors in Dubai amid controversy over the profile of its president. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, Minister of Industry of the United Arab Emirates, the world’s seventh largest oil producer, also serves as president of the country’s main oil company. His career as a businessman in the fossil energy sector had raised accusations of conflict of interest.
The man who will lead these negotiations at Cop28 in Dubai is Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who holds the functions of Minister of Energy and President of Adnoc, the main oil company in the United Arab Emirates, the seventh world producer of black gold and which plans to increase its production capacity in the future. This, despite the recommendations of scientists who call for eliminating fossil fuels to avoid global warming.
“Holding the summit in the United Arab Emirates, which is one of the most productive countries and with the highest emissions per capita (25 tons of CO2 per inhabitant), does not seem, a priori, to be a good decision,” denounces Javier Andaluz, head of climate affairs. in Ecologists in Action. The activist fears, like hundreds of other environmental NGOs, that Al Jaber’s profile is a brake on climate ambitions.
“It is rejected that not only is it welcoming us to a country with strong interests in the fossil industry, but also that the person who is going to preside over the climate negotiations is a senior manager of the national oil company of Abu Dhabi,” details Andaluz, interviewed by RFI on the eve of the opening of Cop28.
“While it is true that the presidency [nota: rotativa de la Cop] It does not directly negotiate the texts, but it is the countries, their mediation work can act as a filter so that proposals such as the necessary setting of an end date for fossil fuels do not leave this agreement,” fears Javier Andaluz.
Dubai Port, United Arab Emirates, 2021. AP – Jon Gambrell
The profile of Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber and the organization of Cop28 in an oil country, which builds artificial islands in the sea and ski slopes in the middle of the desert, also reactivated the debate about the presence of lobbies of fossil industries in international negotiations. In the past, the oil lobby – companies and states – have managed, for example, to include in the negotiations very controversial solutions to offset greenhouse gas emissions, such as the capture of CO2, to avoid having to effectively reduce them.
A COP chaired by an oil country “is a paradox,” admits Colombian climate policy expert Isabel Cavelier Adarve. “Mainly because There is a very real risk that those economic interests will get in the way of that country’s political ability to lead an ambitious consensus.. However, a paradox always has two sides. And the other side of this paradox is that it is essential that all countries in the world, including countries that depend on oil or coal, be part of the solution. That means that no country should be excluded from being part of the solution,” says Cavelier, who advised several Latin American conflicts in climate negotiations.
Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber defended himself against accusations of conflicts of interest and recalled that he also chairs a renewable energy company. According to him, fossil fuels can only be abandoned when the world has the capacity to replace them with renewable energy.. In July, the United Arab Emirates joined the common goal of many countries to triple the production of renewable energy by 2030. But in parallel, it is part of the group of oil-producing countries that advocate carbon capture and storage, techniques that are far from being able to absorb the billions of tons of Co2 that aggravate climate change.
NGOs denounce the presence of oil interest groups
A few days before Cop28, the NGO Corporate Accountability published a report in which it warns about the presence of representatives of polluting oil and gas companies in the UN climate negotiations. “In the last 20 years they have attended UN negotiations at least 7,200 times,” indicate the authors of the report.
“The report reconfirms that unfortunately climate change summits and supranational organizations are controlled by companies that destroy the Planet. It is reprehensible that the companies that emit the most greenhouse gases, which drive warming, appear at the summits,” estimates the Ecuadorian environmental lawyer. Pablo Fajardo from the Union of those affected by Chevron Texaco.
“Since COP9 in 2003, declared employees of fossil fuel companies have attended negotiations a minimum of 945 times. Declared staff from the ‘Big 5’ oil companies – ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and TotalEnergies – have attended a minimum of 267 times”, details the report. Brenna TwoBears, Chief Keep It In The Ground Coordinator of the Indigenous Environmental Network, said fossil fuel lobbies outnumbered the number of Indigenous people attending COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, by around 200%. At Cop27 in Egypt, a record 636 accredited fossil energy lobbyists were registered, 25% more than the previous year. The president of the French oil extraction giant TotalEnergies, Patrick Pouyané, for example attended Cop27 at the invitation of the Egyptian presidency.
The absence of clear rules to avoid conflicts of interest is often criticized. On November 27, the British broadcaster BBC revealed internal reports according to which the Emirati presidency of COP28 included issues of oil projects in private discussions prior to Cop28.
Artificial ski slope in Dubai. 2022. AP – Kamran Jebreili
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