Is it too much to ask that the world’s most important climate summit, where the future of the planet will be decided, is protected from the demands of Big Oil? It is, after all, the very people driving the crisis that the summit is meant to address.
Apparently it is.
Leaked emails obtained by the Centre for Climate Reporting and the BBC suggest that the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, or ADNOC, was aiming to use COP28, hosted by the United Arab Emirates, to seek out new deals for its oil and gas production. ADNOC’s CEO is Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, who also happens to be president of COP28, as the United Nations climate negotiations are known.
A COP president’s simultaneously leading an oil company planning expansion is a blatant conflict of interest. So the reports of abuses of power aren’t surprising, but — as former Vice President Al Gore says — they are still “utterly appalling.”
The COP28 team has downplayed the leak, telling the BBC that al-Jaber is “singularly focused on the business of COP and delivering ambitious and transformational climate outcomes at COP28.”
Nevertheless, a recent investigation by Global Oil and Gas Exit List, a database of the oil and gas industry, revealed that ADNOC’s plans to ramp up its future fossil fuel extraction put it at the top of the list of companies whose forecast emissions from new oil and gas fields will burn through our global carbon budget the fastest.
Meanwhile, Darren Woods, the CEO of ExxonMobil, another front-runner in the race to expand fossil fuel production, claimed last month that reducing the supply of fossil fuels would only cause “human hardship and a poorer world.” We know that’s not true. Fossil fuels are driving human suffering as extreme weather and climate events increase in frequency and intensity. Right now, renewables clearly represent the future, and to suggest that developing countries need to dig for fossil fuels opens them up to the risk of stranded assets when the…
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