Much has been said about the obvious conflicts of interest inherent in an oil executive’s presiding over the annual international climate negotiations, known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP, the next of which, COP28, begins next month. It bears repeating: Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, the head of Adnoc, the United Arab Emirates’ national oil company, has been tapped to lead the summit.
Despite claiming adamantly that his role as the head of an oil company would not adversely affect his ability to lead international climate negotiations, since the announcement of his presidency Al Jaber has consistently had Adnoc staff working directly on COP28 planning. Adnoc staffers have been tasked with supporting the U.A.E.’s hosting activities and public relations for the summit, while at least two recent staffers were tapped as summit negotiators as soon as they left their positions at Adnoc.
Because Adnoc and the COP28 team share a server, I.T. staff from the oil company are able to read any and all COP28 e-mails. Members of the COP28 team share office space with Adnoc staffers. The list of conflicts goes on and on, with a new reveal coming every month since Al Jaber was officially announced president of the conference, back in January of this year. It’s as if Philip Morris were put in charge of the American Medical Association’s convention on lung cancer.
Despite all that, while 133 officials from the E.U. and the United States called for Al Jaber’s removal as conference president in May, a few high-profile billionaires and recognized experts, including Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, have loudly and publicly supported his presidency. Bloomberg has argued that an “all hands on deck” approach is critical for moving the needle on climate, and Gates has highlighted how the U.A.E.’s role and leadership are crucial to meeting climate goals.
Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, the president of Adnoc, the United Arab Emirates’ national oil company, has been tapped to lead the summit.
In a recent conversation, Kerry echoed these sentiments, saying, “There’s no time to waste, we need everyone at the table, and I really think he will be able to get more industry leaders to commit to real action.” If he doesn’t, Kerry said, “it would be a major embarrassment to the U.A.E., and he knows that.”
Oil executives are not a new thing at COP gatherings. Counting the number of industry lobbyists at each summit has become a sport, as their numbers have continued to swell. In fact, the fossil-fuel industry has been deeply embedded in the United Nations’ efforts to coordinate a global response to the climate crisis since the very beginning.
At the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, it was industry P.R. rep E. Bruce Harrison and the cross-industry group he formed, the Global Climate Coalition, that pushed the idea of voluntary action on emissions reductions, rather than regulations on emissions. That summit itself was led by a former C.E.O. of Petro Canada, Maurice Strong, who was, unsurprisingly, also a big proponent of having everyone—particularly fossil-fuel executives—at the table on climate.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.), which produces a report summarizing the results of peer-reviewed climate science roughly every six years, has included lead authors who are oil-company staffers throughout its existence as well. The idea that fossil-fuel executives must be part of the decision-making process on climate has been a popular one for years.
Even Christiana Figueres, an architect of the Paris climate accords, was a proponent of this approach up until this year, when oil companies opted to walk back their climate commitments while raking in record profits off the back of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In July, she wrote a searing op-ed for Al Jazeera entitled, I Thought Fossil Fuel Firms Could Change. I Was Wrong, in which she highlighted how instead of investing their trillions of dollars of windfall profits into an energy transition, oil companies had doubled down on fossil-fuel development, often “lobbying governments to reverse clean energy policies while paying lip service to change.”
Still, Al Jaber’s COP presidency takes the co-opting of international climate negotiations to new heights. And lest anyone think that the president of the conference is not much more than a figurehead, he is in fact exerting enormous influence already via his persistent use of one tiny, wonky word on which the meaningfulness of commitments made at this year’s climate summit hinge: “unabated.”
It’s as if Philip Morris were put in charge of the American Medical Association’s convention on lung cancer.
Al Jaber is very good at making bold, seemingly pro-climate statements in his speeches. While presenting the COP28 plan of action to senior officials from Europe, Canada, and China in July, for example, he said, “We need to attack all emissions, everywhere. One, two and three,” referencing what are called “scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions.” The scopes refer to emissions that a business is directly or indirectly responsible for, ranging from its own activities to its use of energy, to any other emissions it’s associated with.
Al Jaber also said his plan would accelerate “the inevitable and responsible phase-down of all fossil fuels.” But every time he speaks about the need to phase out fossil fuels, Al Jaber inserts a caveat. In his COP28 action plan, for example, he says the goal is “an energy system free of unabated fossil fuels … [emphasis mine] in the middle of this century.” More recently, during the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York (also known as “Climate Week NYC”), Al Jaber repeated this framework, saying, “As we build an energy system free of all unabated fossil fuels, including coal, we must rapidly and comprehensively decarbonize the energies we use today.”
The definition of “unabated emissions,” or the even more fungible term Al Jaber seems to prefer, “unabated fossil fuels,” is still being debated, but most experts describe it as fossil-fuel production or emissions that are not being either captured or offset by some other process. Emissions that are captured, via either carbon or methane capture at the source, or direct-air capture, which extracts CO2 from the atmosphere, would be considered “abated.” Some people consider carbon offsets to be abatement as well, despite the fact that a growing mountain of peer-reviewed research has found the vast majority of offsets to be junk at best, fraudulent at worst.
But the technologies that Al Jaber supports are almost as problematic. Carbon capture and sequestration (C.C.S.) is still in its infancy despite the technology’s having existed for decades. Many currently operational C.C.S. projects use the stored carbon for something called “enhanced oil extraction,” which entails injecting compressed carbon dioxide into the earth in order to extract more oil—whether the resultant oil would be considered “abated” or not is anyone’s guess.
Some people consider carbon offsets to be abatement as well, despite the fact that a growing mountain of peer-reviewed research has found the vast majority of offsets to be junk at best, fraudulent at worst.
Direct-air capture is a promising technology, but even those who are quite optimistic about it (including the I.P.C.C. in its most recent report) are careful to describe it only as a technology to be deployed after we have decarbonized in every other way possible.
As scientist David Ho put it in the journal Nature recently, “Drastically reduce emissions first, or carbon dioxide removal will be next to useless.” Ho went on to explain that direct-air capture deployed today would buy us approximately 13 minutes of atmospheric grace.
Coming to an agreement on what constitutes abatement is sure to be a focal point of this year’s COP, but it’s breathtaking how quickly even the more climate-friendly negotiators have taken to using Al Jaber’s language. In a draft from the European Union, leaked to Reuters in early September, negotiators wrote, “The shift towards a climate neutral economy will require the global phase-out of [unabated] fossil fuels and a peak in their consumption already in the near term.” The use of brackets around the word “unabated” indicates that negotiators are still mulling its inclusion. The mere fact that they’re considering it indicates just how much influence Al Jaber is already having over COP negotiations.
A recent report from Oil Change International found that just 20 countries will be responsible for nearly 90 percent of carbon-dioxide pollution brought on by new oil- and gas-extraction projects between 2023 and 2050. And, yes, most of them are also the historic polluters most responsible for today’s warming as well, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Norway, and the United Kingdom.
Should the world’s leaders agree at this COP to commit to reducing “unabated” emissions instead of overall emissions, they would be giving the green light to fossil-fuel companies to continue expanding fossil-fuel development, and to heavily polluting countries to not only avoid accountability but also to walk back their already inadequate climate pledges.
The fate of the global response to climate change hinges on one word that most of the public has never heard of, and that even experts haven’t yet defined.
It’s a real success story for the fossil-fuel industry, well worth the billions of dollars and decades of lobbying it took to put an oil C.E.O. in charge of COP.
Amy Westervelt is an environmental journalist and the founder of the podcast network Critical Frequency; she is the host of the podcast Drilled