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sultan ahmed al-jaber
'Dystopian': UAE Used Global Climate Summit to Push $100 Billion in New Oil Deals
"Make no mistake, COP28 was hijacked by the interests of the fossil fuel industry," said one campaigner.
Jun 05, 2024
A new analysis released by human rights and anti-corruption group Global Witness on Wednesday left no room for doubt, said one campaigner, that the host country of last year's United Nations climate summit, the United Arab Emirates, prioritized fossil fuel interests over the planet.
"Make no mistake, COP28 was hijacked by the interests of the fossil fuel industry," said Patrick Galey, senior investigator for Global Witness, referring to the 28th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The analysis showed that the UAE's Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) used the COP28 presidency of its CEO, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, to seek deals worth nearly $100 billion with oil, gas, and petrochemical companies in at least 12 countries.
Fossil fuel firms, said Galey, "weren't content simply to block or stall genuine climate policy but used the opportunity to pursue more climate-wrecking oil and gas deals."
Al Jaber previously denied that ADNOC used COP28 to further its business interests after a leak of briefing documents that instructed the company to discuss fossil fuel deals with at least 16 states that were present at the talks.
According to Global Witness, the company sought deals with at least 11 of those countries and at least one other that had not been included in the leaked documents.
The group's investigation found that the UAE redoubled its investment in oil and gas in Egypt in 2023, the year Al Jaber presided over COP28. ADNOC finalized a deal with TotalEnergies Marketing Egypt, purchasing a 50% stake in the company for a reported $200 million—resulting in the UAE now jointly operating 240 service stations across the country and contributing to its record profits posted in 2023.
Other deals sought by ADNOC with COP28 participants include a joint venture with BP to buy a 50% stake in NewMed Energy in Israel and multiple bids for a stake in Braskem, the largest petrochemical producer in Latin America. The company is part-owned by Brazil's state-run oil and gas producer Petrobas.
ADNOC also finalized deals worth an estimated $17 billion with Lukoil in Russia and Wintershall in Germany to develop the Hail and Ghasha gas field in the UAE.
Global Witness' findings bolstered a report by the Center for Climate Reporting and the BBC in November, which showed Al Jaber used his position at COP28 to push for fossil fuel deals with foreign governments.
The report confirms the worst fears of climate campaigners, who were incensed in early 2023 when Al Jaber was named the president of the U.N.'s largest annual climate conference and warned of conflicts of interest due to his position at the helm of ADNOC.
As it turns out, said Galey, "the UAE knew exactly what it was doing and was not let down—COP28 seems to have been molded towards the benefit of its state oil company."
"As depressing as it is dystopian, climate talks must never be allowed to create more climate chaos," he added.
The analysis was released weeks after U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) led 24 Democratic lawmakers in writing to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House Senior Advisor John Podesta, urging them to support conflict of interest guidelines ahead of COP29, which is scheduled to take place in November in Baku, Azerbaijan.
With Mukhtar Babayev, the country's ecology and natural resources minister who worked for a state-owned oil and gas company for more than 20 years, set to preside over the conference, Galey said that "COP28 seems to have provided other petrostates with a sinister playbook to copy and paste from."
"As the UAE passes the baton onto Azerbaijan, we are now looking at the possibility of consecutive COPs being hijacked for the interests of big polluters and their profits," said Galey, noting that scientists have warned the planet is "dangerously close" to heating that exceeds 1.5°C.
Global Witness pointed to recently announced plans to partially privatize the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) ahead of COP29, "with its downstream and petrochemical subsidiaries made available to help attract foreign investments."
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who signed the letter spearheaded by Merkley and Schakowsky, said Global Witness' report "is a disturbing warning about the potential for further fossil fuel corruption at COP29, which incredibly will also be hosted by another fossil fuel executive."
"I will continue urging the U.S. and UNFCCC to adopt new policies to prevent these absurd conflicts of interest that frustrate the international community's work to address the urgent threats of climate change," she said.
Global Witness reached out to ADNOC, SOCAR, and COP29 for comment regarding its investigation, and was told that ADNOC is working to "secure, reliable, and responsible supply of energy to support a just, orderly, and equitable global energy transition and that allegations regarding Al Jaber's deal-making at COP28 are "false, not true, incorrect, and not accurate."
A COP29 spokesperson said Azerbaijan is "100% committed to bringing countries together with the ambition of keeping the 1.5° target within reach."
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), said in a statement Wednesday that Babayev should be removed "from any leadership role at COP29."
"It is an absolute scandal that the UNFCCC has two years running put an oil and gas executive in charge of this event," she said, "thus putting foxes in charge of the henhouse."
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Middle Eastern Governments Are Drilling Their Own Graves
Some of the countries facing the biggest threat from the climate crisis seem all too intent on making it far worse.
Apr 17, 2024
Last September witnessed what used to be a truly rare weather phenomenon: a Mediterranean hurricane, or “medicane.” Once upon a time, the Mediterranean Sea simply didn’t get hot enough to produce hurricanes more than every few hundred (yes, few hundred!) years. In this case, however, Storm Daniel assaulted Libya with a biblical-style deluge for four straight days. It was enough to overwhelm the al-Bilad and Abu Mansour dams near the city of Derna, built in the 1970s to old cool-Earth specifications. The resulting flood destroyed nearly 1,000 buildings, washing thousands of people out to sea, and displaced tens of thousands more.
Saliha Abu Bakr, an attorney, told a harrowing tale of how the waters kept rising in her apartment building before almost reaching the roof and quite literally washing many of its residents away. She clung to a piece of wooden furniture for three hours in the water. “I can swim,” she told a reporter afterward, “but when I tried to save my family, I couldn’t do a thing.” Human-caused climate change, provoked by the way we spew 37 billion metric tons of dangerous carbon dioxide gas into our atmosphere every year, made the Libyan disaster 50 times more likely than it once might have been. And worse yet, for the Middle East, as well as the rest of the world, that nightmare is undoubtedly only the beginning of serial disasters to come (and come and come and come) that will undoubtedly render millions of people homeless or worse.
Failing Grades
In the race to keep this planet from heating up more than 2.7°F (1.5°C) above the preindustrial average, the whole world is already getting abominable grades. Beyond that benchmark, scientists fear, the planet’s whole climate system could fall into chaos, severely challenging civilization itself. The Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), which monitors the implementation of the Paris climate accords, presented its alarming conclusions in a late March report. The CCPI crew was so disheartened by its findings—no country is even close to meeting the goals set in that treaty—that it left the top three slots in its ranking system completely empty.
For the most part, the countries of the Middle East made a distinctly poor showing when it came to the greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels that are already heating the planet so radically. Admittedly, Morocco, with longstanding and ambitious green energy goals, came in ninth, and Egypt, which depends heavily on hydroelectric power and has some solar projects, ranked a modest 22nd. However, some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates hit rock bottom in the CCPI’s chart. That matters since you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that the region produces perhaps 27% of the world’s petroleum annually and includes five of the 10 largest oil producers on the planet.
Ironically enough, the Middle East is at special risk from climate change. Scientists have found that it’s experiencing twice the rate of heating as the global average and, in the near future, they warn that it will suffer, as a recent study from the Carnegie Institute for International Peace put it, from “soaring heatwaves, declining precipitation, extended droughts, more intense sandstorms and floods, and rising sea levels.” And yet some of the countries facing the biggest threat from the climate crisis seem all too intent on making it far worse.
Little Sparta
The CCPI index, issued by Germanwatch, the NewClimate Institute, and the Climate Action Network (CAN), ranks countries in their efforts to meet the goals set by the Paris agreement according to four criteria: their emissions of greenhouse gases, their implementation of renewable energy, their consumption of fossil fuel energy, and their government’s climate policies. The authors listed the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 65th place, calling it “one of the lowest-performing countries.” The report then slammed the government of President Mohammed Bin Zayed, saying: “The UAE‘s per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are among the highest in the world, as is its per capita wealth, while its national climate targets are inadequate. The UAE continues to develop and finance new oil and gas fields domestically and abroad.” On the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula, the UAE has a population of only about a million citizens (and about 8 million guest workers). It is nonetheless a geopolitical energy and greenhouse gas giant of the first order.
The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, or ADNOC, headquartered in that country’s capital and helmed by businessman Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber (who is also the country’s minister of industry and advanced technology), has some of the more ambitious plans for expanding petroleum production in the world. ADNOC is, in fact, seeking to increase its oil production from 4 million to 5 million barrels a day by 2027, while further developing its crucial al-Nouf oil field, next to which the UAE is building an artificial island to help with its expected future expansion. To be fair, the UAE is behaving little differently from the United States, which ranked only a few spots better at 57. Last October, in fact, American oil production, which continues to be heavily government-subsidized (as does that industry in Europe), actually hit an all-time high.
The UAE is a major proponent of the dubious technique of carbon capture and storage, which has not yet been found to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions significantly or to do so safely and affordably. The magazine Oil Change International points out that the country’s carbon capture efforts at the Emirates Steel Plant probably sequester no more than 17% of the CO2 produced there and that the stored carbon dioxide is then injected into older, non-producing oil fields to help retrieve the last drops of petroleum they hold.
Moving away from fossil fuels can make humanity more prosperous and safer from planetary catastrophe rather than turning us into so many beggars.
The UAE, which the Pentagon adoringly refers to as “little Sparta” for its aggressive military interventions in places like Yemen and Sudan, brazenly flouts the international scientific consensus on climate action. As ADNOC’s Al Jaber had the cheek to claim last fall: “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5°C.”
Such outrageous denialism scales almost Trumpian heights in the faux grandeur of its mendacity. At the time, Al Jaber was also, ironically enough, the chairman of the yearly United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) climate summit. Last November 21, he boldly posed this challenge: “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phaseout of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.” (In the world he’s helping to create, of course, even the caves would sooner or later prove too hot to handle.) This year the International Energy Agency decisively answered his epic piece of trolling by reporting that the wealthier nations, particularly the European ones, actually grew their gross national products in 2023 even as they cut CO2 emissions by a stunning 4.5%. In other words, moving away from fossil fuels can make humanity more prosperous and safer from planetary catastrophe rather than turning us into so many beggars.
“Absolutely Not!”
What could be worse than the UAE’s unabashedly pro-fossil fuel energy policy? Well, Iran, heavily wedded to oil and gas, is, at 66, ranked one place lower than that country. Ironically, however, extensive American sanctions on Iran’s petroleum exports may, at long last, be turning that country’s ruling ayatollahs toward creating substantial wind and solar power projects.
But I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that dead last—with an emphasis on “dead”—comes that favorite of Donald (“drill, drill, drill“) Trump, Saudi Arabia, which, at 67, “scores very low in all four CCPI index categories: Energy Use, Climate Policy, Renewable Energy, and GHG Emissions.” Other observers have noted that, since 1990, the kingdom’s carbon dioxide emissions have increased by a compound yearly rate of roughly 4% and, in 2019, that relatively small country was the world’s 10th largest emitter of CO2.
Worse yet, though you wouldn’t know it from the way the leaders of both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are acting, the Arabian Peninsula (already both arid and torrid) is anything but immune to the potential disasters produced by climate change. The year 2023 was, in fact, the third hottest on record in Saudi Arabia. (2021 took the all-time hottest mark so far.) The weather is already unbearable there in the summer. On July 18, 2023, the temperature in the kingdom’s Eastern Province, al-Ahsa, reached an almost inconceivable 122.9°F (50.5°C). If, in the future, such temperatures were to be accompanied by a humidity of 50%, some researchers are suggesting that they could prove fatal to humans. According to Professor Lewis Halsey of the University of Roehampton in England and his colleagues, that kind of heat can actually raise the temperature of an individual by 1.8°F. In other words, it would be as if they were running a fever and, worse yet, “people’s metabolic rates also rose by 56%, and their heart rates went up by 64%.”
Unfortunately, on a planet they are helping to overheat in a remarkable fashion, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have largely taken steps—huge ones, in fact—toward ever more carbon dioxide emissions.
While the Arabian Peninsula is relatively dry, cities on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden can at times be humid and muggy, which means that significant increases in temperature could sooner or later render them uninhabitable. Such rising heat even threatens one of Islam’s “five pillars.” This past year the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, known as the Hajj, took place in June, when temperatures sometimes reached 118°F (48°C) in western Saudi Arabia. More than 2,000 pilgrims fell victim to heat stress, a problem guaranteed to worsen radically as the planet heats further.
Despite the threat that climate change poses to the welfare of that country’s inhabitants, the government of King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is doing less than nothing to address the growing problems. As the CCPI’s authors put it, “Saudi Arabia’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are rising steadily. Its share of renewable energy in total primary energy supply (TPES) is close to zero.” Meanwhile, at the 2022 U.N. climate summit conference held in Egypt, “Saudi Arabia played a notably unconstructive role in the negotiations. Its delegation included many fossil fuel lobbyists. It also tried to water down the language used in the COP’s umbrella decision.”
At the next meeting in Dubai last fall, COP28, the final document called only for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” Avoided was the far more relevant phrase “phase down” or “phase out” when it came to fossil fuels and even the far milder “transitioning away” was only included over the strenuous objections of Riyadh, whose energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman, said “absolutely not” to any such language. He added, “And I assure you not a single person—I’m talking about governments—believes in that.” His assertion was, of course, nonsense. In fact, some leaders, like those of Pacific Island nations, consider an immediate abolition of fossil fuels essential to the very survival of their countries.
Abandoning the Logic of Small Steps
Although Saudi Arabia’s leaders sometimes engage in greenwashing, including making periodic announcements about future plans to develop green energy, they have done virtually nothing in that regard, despite the kingdom’s enormous potential for solar and wind power. Ironically, the biggest Saudi green energy achievement has been abroad, thanks to the ACWA Power firm, a public-private joint venture in the kingdom. The Moroccan government, the only one in the Middle East to make significant strides in combatting climate change, brought in ACWA as part of a consortium to build its epochal Noor concentrated solar energy complex near the ancient city of Ouarzazate at the edge of the Sahara desert. It has set a goal of getting 52% of its electricity from renewables by 2030. Though critics pointed out that it missed its goal of 42% by 2020, government boosters responded that, by the end of 2022, 37% of Morocco’s electricity already came from renewables and, just in the past year, it jumped to 40%, with a total renewables production of 4.6 gigawatts of energy.
Moreover, Morocco has a plethora of green energy projects in the pipeline, including 20 more hydroelectric installations, 19 wind farms, and 16 solar farms. The solar plants alone are expected to generate 13.5 gigawatts within a few years, tripling the country’s current total green energy output. Two huge wind farms, one retooled with a new generation of large turbines, have already come online in the first quarter of this year. The country’s expansion of green electricity production since it launched its visionary plans in 2009 has not only helped it make major strides toward decarbonization but contributed to the electrification of its countryside, where access to power is now universal. Just in the past two and a half decades, the government has provided 2.1 million households with electricity access. Morocco has few hydrocarbons of its own and local green energy helps the state avoid an enormous drain on its budget.
In contrast to the pernicious nonsense often spewed by Saudi and Emirati officials, the Moroccan king, Mohammed VI, is in no doubt about the severe challenges his poverty-ridden country faces. He told the U.N. COP28 climate conference in early December, “Just as climate change is inexorably increasing, the COPs must, from here on, emerge from the logic of ‘small steps,’ which has characterized them for too long.”
Large steps toward a Middle East (and a world) of low-carbon energy would, of course, be a big improvement. Unfortunately, on a planet they are helping to overheat in a remarkable fashion, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have largely taken steps—huge ones, in fact—toward ever more carbon dioxide emissions. Worse yet, they’re located in a part of the world where such retrograde policies are tantamount to playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun.
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'Jaw-Dropping' Analysis Shows Fossil Fuel Companies to Burn Through 62% of Carbon Budget
One researcher called the findings proof that a decarbonization pact signed by the companies "is little more than a forgery."
Jan 26, 2024
In another high-profile case of "greenwashing," the oil and gas companies that signed a decarbonization pact at last year's 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference have plans that would burn through around 62% of the carbon dioxide that can still be emitted without pushing global temperatures past 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.
The figures come from a Global Witness analysis published Friday, which found that the more than 50 companies that signed the pact would release over 150 billion metric tons of climate pollution into the atmosphere by 2050.
"This analysis, while jaw-dropping, only reinforces what we've long known—that fossil fuel companies will stop at nothing to extract every last drop of profit from the world's remaining fossil reserves, no matter the cost," Friends of the Earth climate coordinator Jamie Peters said in a statement.
The Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter was launched at COP28 on December 2 by Saudi Arabia and conference president Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who also heads the United Arab Emirates' state oil company. In the announcement, Al Jaber called it a "great first step" and said that companies representing more than 40% of global oil production had agreed to reach net-zero by or before 2050, end methane emissions, and stop routine flaring by 2030.
However, the pact has a major loophole, as Global Witness points out: It only covers emissions released by the companies directly, not by the use of their products once they are sold. These "scope 3" emissions represent as much as 90% of the oil and gas industry's total carbon footprint.
"After looking at the detail of this pact, signed to great backslapping by bosses of some of the world's largest polluters, I have only two questions: Who do these people think they are, and how stupid do they think we are?" asked Global Witness senior fossil fuels investigator Patrick Galey in a statement.
"If a child promises to do less than 10% of their homework, they don't get a gold star. So why are oil and gas bosses congratulating themselves for signing up to rules they wrote themselves and which only address 10% of their companies' contribution to the climate crisis?" Galey asked.
"The only way to slash emissions from usage of oil and gas is to cut demand."
Global Witness used data from Rystad Energy to look at the production plans of the pact's signatories—which include major state and private companies such as Saudi Aramco, Al Jaber's Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), ExxonMobil, and Shell—and then calculated the total emissions of those plans through 2050.
It found that the companies would produce 265 billion barrels of oil and 26.7 billion cubic meters of gas by 2050, and that this would result in 156 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, or approximately 62% of the remaining carbon budget.
"This pact is little more than a forgery, publicly committing each company to address its outsize contribution to global heating, while privately allowing them to produce and sell billions of barrels of oil and gas for decades more," Galey said.
Of the companies who signed the pact, those with the largest carbon footprints through 2050 were:
- ADNOC and Saudi Aramco, with plans to emit more than a quarter of the remaining climate budget; and
- ExxonMobil, Equinor, TotalEnergies, Eni, and Shell, with plans to emit as much as the European Union does in 15 years.
"You'd think the hottest year in the last 125,000 would be enough to end greenwashing once and for all—but since it wasn't, let's state it plainly. No means no—there's not a way to square 'decarbonization' with fossil fuel expansion," 350.org and Third Act co-founder Bill McKibben said in a statement. "They mean the exact opposite."
The fact that the pact was announced at COP28, along with the high future footprint of ADNOC, calls into question the effectiveness of U.N. climate talks, especially when hosted by major fossil fuel-producing nations like the UAE. This year's COP29 is scheduled to take place in oil and gas-rich Azerbaijan, and will be presided over by a former oil executive.
"COP28 has shown that the profits of fossil fuel companies receive more care than the most affected regions of the world," Luisa Neubauer, climate activist and co-organizer of the Fridays for Future climate strike movement, said in a statement. "Parts of the COP agreement sound like a Christmas present for the fossil fuel lobby. Compared to what is needed in the hottest year in human history, the COP agreement is not even close to enough. The future will lie primarily in the hands of those who resist new coal, oil, and gas projects locally and globally."
Campaigners said that governments must act to phase out fossil fuels.
"This powerful analysis by Global Witness highlights that the operations of the fossil fuel industry make up a tiny proportion of the total carbon emissions from the sector," Cara Jenkinson, the cities manager at climate charity Ashden, said in a statement. "The only way to slash emissions from usage of oil and gas is to cut demand—governments across the world must speed up their electrification plans, with poorer nations being supported to bypass fossil fuel vehicles and ramp up clean renewable energy production."
Galey concluded: "We need a rapid and equitable phaseout of fossil fuels, and fossil fuel bosses must be locked out of climate talks. Everything else is marketing and spin, pure and simple."
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Big Oil Gaslighting on a Planet That Hasn't Been This Hot in 125,000 Years
Every day Big Oil resists investing their obscene profits in truly innovative green energy technology is a day they come closer to future financial ruin.
Dec 19, 2023
A recent opinion poll rocked the world of the Big Oil lobbyists in their proverbial thousand-dollar suits and alligator shoes. The Pew Research Center found that 37% of Americans now feel that fighting the climate crisis should be the number one priority of President Joe Biden and Congress, and another 34% put it among their highest priorities, even if they didn’t rank it first. Companies like ExxonMobil and countries like Saudi Arabia have tried since the 1990s to gaslight the public into thinking climate change was either a total fantasy or that the burning of coal, natural gas, and petroleum wasn’t causing it. Having lost that battle, the fossil-fuel lobbyists have now fallen back on Plan B. They want to convince you that Big Oil is itself swinging into action in a major way to transition to — yes! — green energy.
The hosting of the recent COP28 climate summit by the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s leading petroleum exporters, exemplified exactly this puffery and, sadly enough, it’s just one instance of this greenwashing world of ours. Everywhere you look, you’ll note other versions, but it certainly was a classic example. Emirati businessman Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber served as president of the Dubai-based 28th Conference of Parties — countries that had signed onto the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. While his green bona fides include his role as chairman of the board of the UAE’s green energy firm Masdar, controversy swirled around him because he’s also the CEO of ADNOC, the UAE’s national petroleum company. Worse yet, he’s committed to expanding the oil and gas production of his postage-stamp-sized nation of one million citizens (and eight million guest workers) in a big-time fashion. He wants ADNOC to increase its daily oil production from its present four million barrels a day to five million by 2027, even though climate scientists stress that global fossil-fuel production must be reduced by 3% annually through 2050 if the world is to avoid the most devastating consequences of climate change.
Meanwhile, since COP28 was held in the heart of the petroleum-producing Middle East, it also platformed bad actors like Saudi Arabia, which led the charge to stop the conference from committing to ending the use of fossil fuels by a specific date. The awarding of COP28 to the Emirates by the UNFCCC Secretariat allowed a whole country, perhaps a whole region, to be greenwashed, a genuinely shocking decision that ought to be investigated by the U.N.’s Office of Internal Oversight Services. (And next year, it looks like COP29 will be hosted by another significant oil producer. In other words, the oil countries seem to be on a hot streak!)
Imaginary Algae
Mind you, those Gulf oil states are anything but the only major greenwashers on this planet. After all, the private sector has outdone itself in this arena. A congressional investigation into the major oil companies produced a long report and an appendix that came out last year, including internal corporate emails showing repeated and systemic bad faith on the subject of climate change. ExxonMobil executives, for instance, had publicly committed their company to the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement to keep the increase in the average surface temperature of the earth to no more than 1.5° Centigrade (2.7° Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial era. Although a 1.5-degree increase might sound small, keep in mind that, as a global average, it includes the cold oceans of the higher latitudes, the North and South Poles, and the Himalayas. In already hot climates like South Asia and the Middle East, that means over time it might translate into a stunning 10- to 15-degree increase that could make some places literally unlivable.
Scientists worry that exceeding that level could throw the world’s climate system into full-scale chaos, producing mega-storms, substantial sea level rise, ravaging wildfires, and deadly heat and drought over large parts of the earth’s surface. Still, despite his public commitment to it in 2019, the CEO of ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, asked an oil industry lobbying group to delete a reference to the 2015 Paris climate agreement from the draft of a statement on sustainability it had prepared. That mention, Woods said, “could create a potential commitment to advocate on the Paris agreement goals.” So much for oil company pledges!
In a similar fashion, in 2020, executives of the London-based Shell PLC asked public relations employees to highlight that the company’s vow to reach zero net carbon emissions by 2050 was “a collective ambition for the world,” rather than a “Shell goal or target.” As a company executive admitted all too bluntly, “Shell has no immediate plans to move to a net-zero emissions portfolio over our investment horizon of 10-20 years.” (Oh, and in case you missed this, the profits of the major fossil-fuel outfits have in recent years gone through the roof.)
Nor is corporate greenwashing simply a matter of public pronouncements by oil company executives. ExxonMobil has run a multi-million-dollar campaign of television and streaming advertising attempting to pull the wool over people’s eyes about what it’s doing. In one instance, it paid the New York Times to run an extended commercial gussied up as if it were a news article, a shameful procedure to which the Times acquiesced. Studies show that most readers miss disclaimers about such pieces actually being paid advertisements. It was entitled, “grand plant waste to fuel a sustainable energy future.” The advertisement was extremely misleading. As Chris Wells, an associate professor of emerging media studies at Boston University’s College of Communication, told BU Today last February, “Exxon is doing a lot of advertising around its investments in algae-based biofuels. But these technologies are not yet viable, and there is a lot of skepticism that they ever will be.”
In fact, about a month after Wells gave that interview, ExxonMobil admitted publicly that it had pulled out of algae biofuels research entirely at the end of 2022, having invested about $29 million a year over 12 years. It spent more millions, however, in advertising to give the public the impression that this paltry investment outweighed the company’s multi-billion-dollar efforts to bring ever more petroleum online.
The environmentalist group Client Earth notes that ExxonMobil spends between $20 billion and $25 billion annually looking for — yes, of course! — new oil fields and is committed to doing so through at least 2025. The company had a net profit of $55.7 billion in 2022. In other words, it’s still devoting nearly half of its annual profits to looking for more petroleum when, of course, it could be using them to launch its transition to sustainable forms of energy. Such — to put it politely — inertia is clearly unwise. New electric vehicle sales in the U.S. soared to about a million this year alone, and EVs will have avoided using 1.8 million barrels of oil in 2023. Better yet, the cost of battery packs for the vehicles fell 14% and is expected to keep heading down, guaranteeing that EVs will be ever more affordable over time. Moreover, in significant parts of the rest of the world, as the New York Times reported recently, electric-powered two- and three-wheeled vehicles are beginning to give the giant oil companies a run for their money. In the decades to come, ExxonMobil’s inflexibility and refusal to innovate will undoubtedly doom the company, but the question remains: In the process, will it doom the rest of us, too?
A Deceptive Greenwashing Marketing Campaign
In another, better world, the courts could punish the oil majors for their greenwashing. That misleading paid ad in the New York Times forms but one cornerstone of a wide-ranging lawsuit against ExxonMobil by the state of Massachusetts, initiated in 2019, which has so far survived that company’s legal challenges. As the office of Attorney General, Andrea Campbell explains, it is “alleging that the company violates Massachusetts law through a deceptive ‘greenwashing’ marketing campaign that misleadingly presents Exxon as a leader in cutting-edge clean energy research and climate action… and… its products as ‘green’ while the company is massively ramping up fossil fuel production and spending only about one-half of 1% of revenues on developing clean energy.” Campbell, an African-American born in Boston, is keenly aware that climate change is an equity issue, since its deleterious effects will initially be felt most strongly among the less privileged. (Of course, given our present Supreme Court, don’t hold your breath on this one.)
In its complaint, the state points to marketing campaigns like those featured on ExxonMobil’s YouTube channel, which still shows an ad produced eight years ago, “Making the World’s Energy go Further,” that, in just 30 seconds, presents a medley of greenwashing’s greatest early hits — algae biofuel, “new technology for capturing CO2 emissions,” and cars twice as efficient in their gas mileage. Algae biofuels, however, have by now bitten the dust; there is no affordable and safe method of capturing and storing carbon dioxide; and electric cars are between “2.6 to 4.8 times more efficient at traveling a mile compared to a gasoline internal combustion engine,” according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The biggest fault in such commercials, however, is that the oil company’s ad makers were trying to convince the public that ExxonMobil was putting major resources into sustainable alternatives. As the state of Massachusetts points out, in reality “ExxonMobil has ramped up production and reportedly is now the most active driller in the Permian Basin, the shale oil field located in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico that yields low-cost oil in months, rather than the years required for larger offshore projects to begin producing crude… ExxonMobil has invested billions of dollars into the development of massive Canadian oil sands projects, which are among the costliest and most polluting oil extraction projects in the world.”
Carbon Capture and Lake Nyos
An even more dangerous scam than algae biofuels (implausible but not life-threatening) is the idea of carbon capture and storage (CCS). Remind me: Why would we try to store billions of tons of a poisonous gas? On August 21, 1986, subterranean carbon dioxide deposits bubbled up through Lake Nyos in Cameroon, killing nearly 2,000 people, thousands of cattle and other animals, and in the process turned four local villages into graveyards. Some scientists fear similar underground carbon dioxide storage elsewhere could set off earthquakes. And what if such quakes in turn release the gas? Honestly, since I still remember the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster where 11 million gallons of oil, spilled into the waters off Alaska, wrecked hundreds of miles of shoreline and killed unknown numbers of sea creatures and birds, I’d just as soon not have ExxonMobil store carbon dioxide in my neighborhood.
Worse yet, most of the CO2 harvested by oil companies so far has been injected into drill sites to help bring in — yes, you guessed it! — more petroleum. Worse yet, studies have shown that carbon-capture technology itself emits a lot of carbon dioxide, that it can only capture a fraction of the CO2 emitted by fossil fuels, and that just shutting down coal, fossil gas, and petroleum production and substituting wind, solar, hydro, and batteries is far safer, cheaper, and better for the environment.
Carbon capture is, however, a favorite greenwashing tool of Big Oil, since company executives can pretend that a technological breakthrough somewhere on the horizon justifies continuing to spew out record quantities of CO2 in the present moment. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) wasted billions of taxpayer dollars by including provisions for CCS research and development in Joe Biden’s otherwise admirable Inflation Reduction Act. In the process, he managed to insert a key greenwashing technique into even the most progressive climate legislation ever passed by an industrialized hydrocarbon state.
As for Sultan Al-Jaber, the head of COP28, he let his mask slip in November in a testy exchange with former Irish President Mary Robinson, who had invited him to an online discussion of how women’s lives could be improved if the climate crisis were effectively addressed. When she urged him to act as president of COP28, he exploded: “I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.” He was pushing back against the goal advocated by scientists and many diplomats of quickly phasing hydrocarbons out. He claims to advocate phasing them down, not presumably eliminating them. He added, “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.” Al-Jaber was posturing, since he surely knows that the International Energy Agency has issued just such a roadmap, which does indeed require rapid reductions in fossil fuel use. Oh, and if he has his way, it’s quite conceivable that, somewhere down the road, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates, Dubai, could become too hot to be livable.
Given the plummeting cost of green energy, it’s clear that moving quickly and completely away from fossil fuels will improve the quality of life for people globally while making energy cheaper. In the end, COP28 could only issue an anodyne call for “transitioning away” from fossil fuels. Despite al-Jaber’s globe-straddling greenwashing at the climate summit, however, there is no realistic alternative to phasing fossil fuels not just down but out, and on an accelerated timeline, if our planet’s climate isn’t to turn into a Frankenstein’s monster. After all, 2023 has already proved a unique year for heat — with month after month of record-setting warmth across the globe. And sadly, as fossil-fuel production only continues to increase, that’s just the beginning, not the end, when it comes to potentially broiling this planet.
Admittedly, under the best of circumstances, this transition would be challenging and, according to the United Nations, will certainly require more investments than the countries of the world are now making, but it still appears eminently achievable. As for ExxonMobil and other oil majors, every day they resist investing their obscene profits in truly innovative green energy technology is a day they come closer to future financial ruin. In the meantime, they are, of course, wreaking historically unprecedented harm on the planet, as was all too apparent with the serial climate disasters of 2023, now believed to be the hottest of the last 125,000 years.
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WHDSF: The Next Climate Acronym
WHDSF stands for “Wildfires, Heatwaves, Droughts, Storms, and Floods,” and is a handy way to remember the range of catastrophic change we’re going through.
Dec 17, 2023
If people can remember socially important acronyms like LGBTQ + and an older generation can’t get toxic advertising acronyms like LSMFT out of their brains (BTW—it stands for “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”) we might all want to start remembering WHDSF whenever the issue of climate change comes up.
WHDSF stands for “Wildfires, Heatwaves, Droughts, Storms, and Floods,” and is a handy way to remember the range of catastrophic change we’re going through. These are not all of the impacts from fossil fuel-fired climate disruption of course (sea-level rise and melting glaciers are two more that come to mind), but WHDSF are the most readily recognizable that scientists are able to measure in terms of growth, frequency, and intensity.
They are the poster disasters when “extreme weather events” make the news as they increasingly do. Which is not surprising given that the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration—NOAA—has confirmed that in 2023 there were 25 weather or climate disasters with losses exceeding a billion dollars just in the U.S. and just as of early November. That’s compared to an average of less than six per year in the 1990s that grew to 13 per year by the last decade (2010s).
If the basic science is too hard to follow, here’s a simple equation that gets to its heart: BP, EXXON, CO2, UAE and WTF equals WHDSF.
The science is pretty basic if you “believe” in science. The burning of fossil fuels has raised atmospheric carbon dioxide, a major heat trapping greenhouse gas, from a preindustrial level of 280 parts per million (ppm) to today’s 424 ppm and still rising, trapping ever more solar heat in Earth’s atmosphere (and in the ocean) that would otherwise radiate back into space.
This explains why the last 10 years have been the hottest in human history, with 2023 now slated to go down as the best ever for air conditioner sales. This past summer clearly reflected climate scientists’ decades of warnings that if we didn’t act quickly, we’d transition from a dangerous to a catastrophic climate regime. Welcome to the age of WHDSF.
For more information on what’s not getting done fast enough, feel free to check out COP28, the annual U.N. climate summit just concluded in the oil rich United Arab Emirates monarchy and its billionaire theme park, Dubai. It was presided over by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, chief of the UAE’s national oil company who recently claimed there is “no science” behind demands to phase out fossil fuels. Or, as Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
So, if the basic science is too hard to follow, here’s a simple equation that gets to its heart: BP, EXXON, CO2, UAE and WTF equals WHDSF, also the need for a rapid transition from fossil fuels to a clean energy economy by, according to the best available science, ten years ago. Also, acronyms like WHDSF have particular appeal for our ADHD trending youth. That is why, next year when some high school student asks her buddy, “How’s Your Summer Going?”, they might reply:
“Not Great.”
“Why Not?”
“You know, WHDSF.”
“I heard you’ve had big H out there.”
“Actually W, H, and D.”
“Well, you know what they say, ‘Wildfire sky in the morning, better take warning. Wildfire sky across the state, better evacuate, or, you know, if you’re Canadian, find something that rhymes with province.’”
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Why Science Backs a Fossil Fuel Phaseout
There is literally no way to achieve the 1.5°C target without drastic reductions in the burning of fossil fuels currently being used to produce electricity, fuel industry, move cars, and heat buildings.
Dec 12, 2023
Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber of the United Arab Emirates, who is currently presiding over the COP28 climate talks in Dubai (as well as presiding over the UAE’s state oil company, ADNOC) was quoted last week as saying “there is no science out there… that says the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5°C.”
His remarks were immediately derided by climate scientists, as well as by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who declared, “The science is clear: The 1.5°C limit is only possible if we ultimately stop burning all fossil fuels. Not reduce, not abate. Phase out, with a clear timeframe.”
So what exactly is the science behind the need to completely stop the burning of fossil fuels? Thanks to the work of thousands of climate scientists from all over the world, we now know with absolute certainty that rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are leading directly to rising average global temperatures.
We also know, within various margins of error, exactly where those emissions are coming from. The burning of fossil fuels to generate electricity contributes almost a quarter (23%) of total greenhouse gas emissions globally. Industry contributes another 23% of total greenhouse gas emissions, and this is almost exclusively from the burning of fossil fuels to produce steel, cement, and other products.
The extraction, refining and transportation of fossil fuels themselves contributes a further 10% of total emissions. The burning of fossil fuels to move cars and other vehicles along our roads contributes about 10% of total greenhouse gas emissions. Aviation and shipping contribute another 5%. The burning of fossil fuels to heat buildings contributes 5%. This all adds up to more than 75% of all greenhouse gas emissions coming from the burning of fossil fuels.
In order to keep global warming to within 1.5°C of the preindustrial baseline average, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has determined that the world will need to cut greenhouse gas emissions roughly in half, from nearly 60 billion tons of carbon per year today to roughly 30 billion tons by 2030, and reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
Anyone can do the math. There is literally no way to achieve either of these targets without drastic reductions in the burning of fossil fuels currently being used to produce electricity, fuel industry, move cars, and heat buildings. The only serious question is whether the world can achieve net-zero by 2050 without phasing out the burning of fossil fuels completely, as the U.N. secretary-general has suggested.
The meaning of net-zero is that whatever carbon emissions are still going into the atmosphere by 2050 must be cancelled out by an equivalent amount of carbon sequestration that pulls the carbon back out of the atmosphere. The dream of fossil fuel executives like Al Jaber is that new technologies, as yet unproven to work at scale, will enable industries to extract the carbon back out of the atmosphere as fast as they spew it into the atmosphere, thus allowing the burning of fossil fuels to continue indefinitely and still achieve the “net-zero” target.
The only thing in the way of phasing out fossil fuels and saving the planet from climate catastrophe is the belief that this is somehow not possible.
Even with billions more dollars for various “carbon capture and storage” projects coming from the Inflation Reduction Act, the amount of carbon that could conceivably be taken out of the atmosphere by 2050 is comparatively small relative to the 60 billion tons per year currently going in. The bigger problem is that greenhouse gas emissions other than those from the burning of fossil fuels will be almost impossible to eliminate by 2050. These include 3 billion tons of carbon-equivalent methane coming from enteric fermentation (belching cattle); another 2 billion from industrial and municipal wastewater, landfills, and sewage treatment; and various other hard-to-eliminate sources.
A massive shift to regenerative farming practices and to more vegetable-based diets can certainly make a difference, but with as many as 2 billion subsistence farmers in the world, and billions more with serious food insecurity, it is scarcely imaginable that the world could make the kinds of transformations needed to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural and waste sectors by 2050.
That leaves us with the obvious alternative to reaching net-zero by 2050: the complete phasing out of fossil fuel burning. This is not only the most obvious route to cutting emissions to half their current level by 2030 and to net-zero by 2050. Phasing out the burning of fossil fuels is also something we can easily do and we can begin doing it right now! As Mark Z Jacobson says in the title of his new book on the prospects for producing 100% of the world’s electricity from water, wind, and sun, “No miracles needed” to do this. We have the technologies. We have the resources. We have the skills. The price is affordable. The transition is doable.
The only thing in the way of phasing out fossil fuels and saving the planet from climate catastrophe is the belief that this is somehow not possible. It’s time we moved beyond that to the belief that this is absolutely essential—and the time to start phasing out fossil fuels is right now.
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US Hypocrisy at COP28 Seems Designed 'To Drive People Insane'
One critic noted that the United States is "insisting that a fossil fuel phaseout is the moral litmus test for climate leadership at COP28 while reaching record levels crude oil production—with no plans to stop!"
Dec 12, 2023
As the current United Nations Climate Change Conference draws to a close, campaigners and journalists say U.S. hypocrisy is making it harder to negotiate a just and equitable phaseout of fossil fuels.
U.S. Special Envoy for Climate John Kerry said at the talks that he supported a phaseout, as The New York Times reported, and the U.S. State Department said Monday that a draft that excluded it "needs to be substantially strengthened," according to the Financial Times. Yet U.S. projects make up more than a third of all new oil and gas extraction planned worldwide through 2050, prompting Oil Change International to dub it the "planet-wrecker-in-chief."
"The U.S. insisting that a fossil fuel phaseout is the moral litmus test for climate leadership at COP28 while reaching record levels crude oil production—with no plans to stop!—feels like a strategy designed in a lab to drive people insane," journalist Kate Aronoff tweeted Monday.
"It's easy to point the finger at some of the Gulf states here, but we should not ignore the fact that the United States has the single largest oil and gas expansion plans of any country in the world by far."
When a draft text of the Global Stocktake was published Monday with no mention of the fossil fuel phaseout called for by civil society and many climate vulnerable nations, much of the outrage focused on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), including COP28 host country the United Arab Emirates. The conference already faced scrutiny because its president, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, is also the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), and a whistleblower account ahead of the conference revealed he had been using COP28 negotiations to push oil and gas deals.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, for example, said the draft text read "as if OPEC dictated it word for word," adding it was "'of the Petrostates, by the Petrostates, and for the Petrostates.'"
Yet even before the draft, climate advocates had pointed out that the so-called petrostates weren't the only ones obstructing progress: While not a member of OPEC, the U.S. has been the leading producer of oil and gas for the last five years, overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia by 44%, according to Inside Climate News.
"It's easy to point the finger at some of the Gulf states here, but we should not ignore the fact that the United States has the single largest oil and gas expansion plans of any country in the world by far," Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns with ActionAid USA, told Inside Climate News.
At the same time, the U.S. is pushing untested solutions like carbon capture and storage (CCS) and treating Indigenous, minority, and low-income communities within its own borders as sacrifice zones.
"They want to ship captured carbon from their land to my homelands and sequester it there," Panganga Pungowiyi, an Indigenous mother from Sivungaq, on Dena ina lands near Anchorage, Alaska, told Inside Climate News. "What we're observing is the violation of Indigenous people's rights and the violation of the sacredness of Mother Earth by continued commodification, whether by the extraction of fossil fuels or by the designation of her body and surface as a storage facility for carbon."
"The U.S., in other words, would like the rest of the world to agree to do something it cannot possibly do itself."
When it comes to fossil fuel expansion in particular, the U.S. Gulf Coast sits on the frontlines of drilling, petrochemical manufacturing, and the buildout of liquefied natural gas export facilities.
"To us in the Gulf South, what they say is not matched by their actions," John Beard, founder and executive director of the Port Arthur Community Action Network in Texas, told Inside Climate News of the U.S. government. "They continue to do more of what created the problem by allowing more liquid fossil gas facilities to be sited and by expediting more crude oil exports."
Overall, President Joe Biden approved more oil and gas drilling permits on public lands in the first two years of his administration than did former President Donald Trump in the first two years of his, despite a campaign promise to end the practice.
What's true of government plans is also true of U.S.-based fossil fuel companies, Aronoff pointed out for The New Republic: ExxonMobil plans to increase production by 11% next year and even further to 4.2 million barrels of oil a day by 2027 while Chevron said it would increase its spending from $17 billion this year to $18.5-19.5 billion in 2024. Current U.S. law does not limit fossil fuel production; the Inflation Reduction Act only provides carrots for renewable energy, not sticks for oil, gas, and coal. And the makeup of Congress means that Democrats would have a difficult time passing laws to restrict fossil fuels even if they wanted to.
By calling for a fossil fuel phaseout at COP28, Aronoff wrote, "the U.S., in other words, would like the rest of the world to agree to do something it cannot possibly do itself. It is by all accounts planning to speed in the opposite direction, with no plans to place any limits on the companies leading that charge. You'd be forgiven for thinking this situation doesn't make any sense because it doesn't."
Another factor that undermines the U.S. and other wealthy nations during climate negotiations is their lack of commitment to funding the renewable energy transition in developing countries.
"Where is the money? Where's the money?"
While the U.S. and E.U. call for a phaseout, Sara Shaw of Friends of the Earth International said, "they are seeking to water down the climate finance provisions (one of the elements of the text which is better than expected) so urgently needed to enable the energy transition in the Global South."
The U.S. has already successfully weakened the framework document for the new Loss and Damage Fund to help developing nations with the inevitable costs of climate change, Wu wrote in Context. Instead of stipulating that developed nations contribute, it now reads, "The fund is able to receive contributions from a wide variety of sources.
Wu added on social media that some developing countries are satisfied with the COP28 stocktake draft text as is because they do not think it would be possible to phase out fossil fuels without funding, and they do not trust wealthy nations to provide it.
"No phaseout/no finance leads to climate chaos. Phaseout/no finance ALSO leads to climate disaster, because a phaseout isn't possible in the majority world without finance and tech," Wu tweeted. "We need phaseout WITH finance."
"Only developed countries have the ability to deliver the missing ingredient to make this whole process work," Wu continued. "Not only are they not doing it, they're signaling that they never want to do it, by watering all new text recalling their obligations. It's never been clearer that providing finance is not only an ethical imperative, it's also a climate imperative. If we must play a blame game, let's point the finger at the developed countries that have been consistently failing this imperative."
Romain Ioualalen, the global policy campaign manager at Oil Change International, added: "Where is the money? Where's the money? We've been hearing from the African group in particular that they're not opposed to transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy but they're going to need support."
"If developed countries had met their financial obligations in this process, and were sending a clear signal that these countries would be financially supported through the transition, maybe the deal would be more secure at this stage," Ioualalen said.
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COP28 on 'Verge of Complete Failure' as Draft Omits Fossil Fuel Phaseout
"Nations committed to climate action must reject this weakened proposal," said one campaigner.
Dec 11, 2023
The most recent draft text of the agreement world leaders are hoping to reach by the end of the United Nations Climate Change Conference on December 12 does not include any mention of a phaseout of fossil fuels.
Instead, the document released Monday calls for "reducing both consumption and production of fossil fuels, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner so as to achieve net zero by, before, or around 2050 in keeping with the science."
"COP28 is now on the verge of complete failure," former U.S. Vice President Al Goretweeted in response to the release. "The world desperately needs to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but this obsequious draft reads as if OPEC dictated it word for word. It is even worse than many had feared. It is 'Of the Petrostates, by the Petrostates, and for the Petrostates.'"
"How do we go home and tell our people that this is what the world has to say about our futures?"
An agreement to phase out fossil fuels at COP28 has been a major demand of civil society groups and influential delegations including the European Union and nations especially vulnerable to the climate crisis, according to Reuters. The call comes as nations' current pledges under the Paris agreement put the world on a path for 2.9°C of warming, even as 2023 is almost certain to be the hottest year on record.
Yet there were concerns leading into the U.N. talks that the influence of the fossil fuel industry would undermine an ambitious outcome. COP28 President Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber is also the CEO of the United Arab Emirates' national oil company, and reports emerged that he had used talks surrounding COP28 to push oil and gas deals.
The latest language on fossil fuels comes in the text of the Global Stocktake, a mechanism by which parties to the Paris agreement assess their progress and set new goals. It is one bullet in a list of actions that the draft says nations "could include" in the path to "deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions."
Other actions in the list include
- Tripling renewable energy capacity and doubling efficiency by 2030;
- Quickly "phasing down unabated coal";
- Achieving a "net-zero energy system" as soon as possible;
- Curbing greenhouse gases beyond carbon dioxide such as methane; and
- Ending "inefficient fossil fuel subsidies."
"The COP28 draft text resembles a disjointed wish list, far from the stringent measures required to limit warming to 1.5°C," Andreas Sieber, associate director of policy and campaigns at 350.org, said in a statement. "The presidency, displaying a troubling lack of leadership, has notably weakened commitments to phasing out fossil fuels and promoting renewables."
Sieber also criticized the lack of urgency in the text's overall language.
"By framing actions as 'could' instead of 'shall,' and with weak language on short-term declines and renewable targets, this draft falls short. Nations committed to climate action must reject this weakened proposal, insisting on transformative changes for a meaningful impact on global warming."
The Alliance of Small Island States, meanwhile, told the Financial Times that the "weak language on fossil fuels was completely insufficient."
Joseph Sikulu, Pacific managing director of 350.org, added, "This week we felt that the goal of phasing out fossil fuels was within reach, but the lack of climate leadership shown by the presidency and the blatant watering down of commitments to a 'wish list' is an insult to those of us that came here to fight for our survival. How do we go home and tell our people that this is what the world has to say about our futures?"
Environmental Defense associate director of national change Julia Levin called the draft text "unacceptable," while Jean Su from the Center for Biological Diversity told The Associated Press that it "moves disastrously backward from original language offering a phaseout of fossil fuels."
"If this race-to-the-bottom monstrosity gets enshrined as the final word, this crucial COP will be a failure," Su said.
Climate campaigners are also concerned that the text opens the doorway to untested technological solutions like carbon capture and storage that can be used to extend the burning of fossil fuels.
"The word 'phaseout' has been phased out."
"It's incredibly dangerous for the fossil fuel industry and its enablers in government to promote the idea that they can keep burning fossil fuels while pulling carbon out of the air or out of the smokestacks with technologies that consistently fail to deliver," Collin Rees, the U.S. program manager at Oil Change International, told New York Times opinion writer Peter Coy before the latest draft was released.
Despite these warnings, one of the suggested actions in the text is "accelerating zero and low emissions technologies, including, inter alia, renewables, nuclear, abatement, and removal technologies, including such as carbon capture and utilization and storage, and low carbon hydrogen production, so as to enhance efforts towards substitution of unabated fossil fuels in energy systems."
"Like the smog-ridden Dubai skyline, the mention of fossil fuels in the final outcome is at best murky, and at worst, dangerous," Cansin Leylim, 350.org associate director of global campaigns, said in a statement. "This outcome leaves the doors wide open to dangerous distractions and false technologies like carbon capture and storage (CCS), which will surely blow us past the 1.5°C planetary limit, and fails to integrate the crucial finance and equitability aspects of the just transition to renewable energy that we need."
Sara Shaw with Friends of the Earth International agreed that "the fossil fuel text is alarmingly weak and opens the door to risky, dangerous CCS/CCUS, hydrogen, nuclear, and carbon removal technologies (geoengineering, or nature-based). These loopholes prolong the fossil fuel era, and delay and distract from any meaningful phaseout."
However, she added there was more going on behind the scenes.
"Countries who claim to be climate champions like the U.S. and E.U. are calling for stronger fossil fuel phaseout text, despite planning massive fossil fuel expansion," Shaw said. "And they are seeking to water down the climate finance provisions (one of the elements of the text which is better than expected) so urgently needed to enable the energy transition in the global South."
Activists are still hoping to strengthen the language before negotiations conclude Tuesday.
"The word 'phaseout' has been phased out," Li Shuo, director of the Asia Society Policy Institute, told AP. "We need to phase in the word phaseout. I think there's still a chance for countries to do so."
Peri Dias, 350.org Latin America representative at COP28, said: "In the coming hours, we will either witness a historic decision for the good of the planet, or one for its end. Are the parties at COP28 going to agree to a rapid and fair elimination of fossil fuels or not?"
Gore concluded: "There are 24 hours left to show whose side the world is on: the side that wants to protect humanity's future by kickstarting the orderly phase out of fossil fuels or the side of the petrostates and the leaders of the oil and gas companies that are fueling the historic climate catastrophe."
"In order to prevent COP28 from being the most embarrassing and dismal failure in 28 years of international climate negotiations, the final text must include clear language on phasing out fossil fuels," he said. "Anything else is a massive step backwards from where the world needs to be to truly address the climate crisis and make sure the 1.5°C goal doesn't die in Dubai."
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Report Details 'Toxic' Fossil Fuel Pollution in COP28 Host UAE
"Nobody will ever hold the government to account publicly," said one climate campaigner. "We do not have the privilege of speaking out against the government."
Dec 04, 2023
Despite greenwashing efforts like hosting the ongoing United Nations Climate Change Conference, the United Arab Emirates—the world's seventh-biggest oil producer and sixth-largest exporter—is contributing heavily to toxic air pollution, creating a "devastating impact on human health."
That's according to a Monday report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) report—entitled 'You Can Smell Petrol in the Air': UAE Fossil Fuels Feed Toxic Pollution—which "documents alarmingly high air pollution levels in the UAE" and how toxic air caused by oil and gas production creates "major health risks" for the country's 9.4 million people.
As the report details:
The UAE government says that the country has poor air quality but mainly ascribes this to natural dust from sandstorms. However, academic studies have shown that natural causes are not the single, or in some cases even the major, factor in air pollution. A 2022 academic study found that, in addition to the dust, emissions including from fossil fuels contribute significantly to the problem in the UAE. Air pollution and climate change are directly linked, as the extraction and use of fossil fuels are the sources of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
The report's researchers analyzed levels of PM2.5—fine particulate matter measuring 2.5 micrometers or smaller that can penetrate human lungs and blood—at 30 UAE government monitoring stations and found that they were, on average, three times higher than the World Health Organization's (WHO) daily recommended exposure.
According to the latest available data from the World Bank, the UAE's mean annual PM2.5 exposure is over eight times higher than what the WHO says is safe.
The WHO estimates that approximately 1,870 people die each year from outdoor air pollution in the UAE.
"Fossil fuels pollute the air people breathe in the UAE," HRW environment director Richard Pearshouse said in a statement. "But the obliteration of civil society by UAE's government means that no one can publicly express concerns, let alone criticize the government's failure to prevent this harm."
The report explains:
Those in the UAE wanting to report on, or speak out about, the risks of fossil fuel expansion and its links to air pollution face risks of unlawful surveillance, arrest, detention, and ill-treatment. Over the last decade, authorities in the UAE have embarked on a sustained assault on human rights and freedoms, including targeting human rights activists, enacting repressive laws, and using the criminal justice system as a tool to eliminate the human rights movement. These policies have led to the complete closure of civic space, severe restrictions on freedom of expression, both online and offline, and the criminalization of peaceful dissent.
"Nobody will ever hold the government to account publicly," said one climate activist interviewed by HRW. "We do not have the privilege of speaking out against the government."
Pearshouse argued: "Air pollution is a dirty secret in the UAE. If the government doesn't allow civil society to scrutinize and speak freely about the connection between air pollution and its fossil fuel industry, people will keep experiencing health conditions that are entirely preventable."
Most of those affected by air pollution in the UAE are migrant workers, who make up nearly 90% of the country's population. In addition to enduring widespread serious labor abuses, these workers—many of whom hail from some of the world's most climate-vulnerable countries—face deadly dangers from air pollution.
Migrant workers interviewed by HRW said they breathe air that burns their lungs, are often short of breath at work, and suffer from skin and other ailments they believe could be caused by pollution. However, migrant workers told HRW that they were given no information about the risks of air pollution or how to protect themselves.
One migrant worker told HRW: "Sometimes, the environment becomes dark and murky. We discuss among friends why it is that way... The conversation ends there. During such times friends also fall sick."
While the UAE government has submitted a recently revised domestic climate action plan as required by the 2015 Paris agreement, the plan has been criticized for its continued reliance upon fossil fuel production.
"Sometimes, the environment becomes dark and murky. We discuss among friends why it is that way."
The choice of the UAE and the CEO of its national oil company—Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber—as host and president of the U.N. Climate Change Conference also stunned and angered many climate campaigners around the world. In the United States, climate activists were also outraged after U.S. climate envoy John Kerry glowingly endorsed Al Jaber as "a terrific choice" for the COP28 presidency.
Late last month, internal records leaked by a whistleblower showed that Al Jaber used meetings about COP28 to push foreign governments for fossil fuel deals. In response to the allegation, former Marshallese President Hilda Heine resigned from COP28's advisory board.
Al Jaber stoked further controversy over the weekend when he insisted there is "no science" supporting the effort to rapidly phase out planet-heating fossil fuels.
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COP28 Adviser Quits Over Alleged UAE Oil and Gas Deal-Making
"These actions undermine the integrity of the COP presidency and the process as a whole," former Marshallese President Hilda Heine wrote in her resignation letter to COP28 chief Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber.
Dec 01, 2023
United Nations Climate Change Conference advisory board member Hilda Heine resigned on Friday, citing reports that the Emirati oil executive presiding over COP28 has been busy pushing for fossil fuel deals in the run-up to the event.
Earlier this week, the Center for Climate Reporting and the BBC reported that Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber—who is simultaneously serving as COP28 president and CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC)—"has held scores of meetings with senior government officials, royalty, and business leaders from around the world in recent months" as the "COP28 team has quietly planned to use this access as an opportunity to increase exports of ADNOC's oil and gas."
"These actions undermine the integrity of the COP presidency and the process as a whole."
In her resignation letter, which was seen and first reported by Reuters, Heine—who is a former president of the low-lying Marshall Islands, one of the world's most climate-imperiled nations—called the United Arab Emirates' plan to make oil and gas deals at COP28 "deeply disappointing."
"These actions undermine the integrity of the COP presidency and the process as a whole," she asserted, adding that the only way Al Jaber can restore confidence is to "deliver an outcome that demonstrates that you are committed to phasing out fossil fuels."
Al Jaber has denied that he's using COP28 for fossil fuel deal-making.
"These allegations are false, not true, incorrect, and not accurate," he said Wednesday at a Dubai press conference. "And it's an attempt to undermine the work of the COP28 presidency."
A spokesperson for COP28's presidency said they are "extremely disappointed by Dr. Heine's resignation."
"We appreciated her advice throughout the year and that we only wish she would have been with us here in the UAE celebrating the adoption of a fund that will support vulnerable island states and those most affected by climate impacts," the spokesperson said, referring to the global "loss and damage" fund that one critic
slammed as "a drop in the ocean compared to the scale of the need they are to address."
The UAE isn't the only major oil producer pushing fossil fuels while participating in COP28. Saudi Arabia—whose Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Thursday was among the world leaders kicking off talks at the conference—"is overseeing a sweeping global investment program" intended to "ensure that emerging economies across Africa and Asia become vastly more dependent on oil," the Center for Climate Reporting and Channel 4 News revealed this week.
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