In what one news report called a “remarkable rebuke” heading into mid-year climate negotiations, more than 130 members of the U.S. Congress and the European Parliament are asking the United Nations and other key decision-makers to remove Sultan al Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), from his role as COP 28 President.
“The decision to name as president of COP 28 the chief executive of one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies—a company that has recently announced plans to add 7.6 billion barrels of oil to its production in the coming years, representing the fifth-largest increase in the world— risks undermining the negotiations,” states the May 23 letter [pdf] addressed to UN Secretary General António Guterres, UN climate secretary Simon Stiell, U.S. President Joe Biden, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Enacting new COP policies “that expose the influence of corporate polluters in UNFCCC meetings will help ensure that climate science takes precedence over climate delay and greenwashing,” the letter adds. But those “commonsense reforms to help restore public faith in the COP process” will be “severely jeopardized by having an oil company executive at the helm.”
U.S. signatories to the letter include Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Bernie Saunders (I-VT), House Speaker Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), and nearly three dozen other legislators, the Washington Post and Politico-EU report. Politico cites nearly 100 EU signatories, including Greens leaders Terry Reintke and Philippe Lamberts, The Left leaders Manon Aubry and Martin Schirdewan, and Socialists & Democrats vice chair Mohammed Chahim.
Whitehouse rejected arguments from al Jaber’s defenders that he’s the right pick for the job after a 20-year career in renewable energy. He now serves as CEO of renewables powerhouse Masdar.
“The fact that he’s engaged in the renewable industry is fine,” Whitehouse said. “But you can engage in the renewable industry all day long, and as long as you’re still pumping carbon pollution into the atmosphere, that’s where the danger lies.”
“Corporate greed and lobbyists’ lies have led us into this climate crisis,” added Aubry. “We must prevent private interests from interfering in politics and regain ownership of our future.”
“The lawmakers’ letter adds weight to a growing campaign on both sides of the Atlantic to replace Al Jaber,” Politico says. The Post says it follows “swift condemnation” from human rights activists last week, after the United Arab Emirates invited Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to the conference.
Amnesty International called that move a “sick joke” and warned that it “would normalize relations with the Assad regime, which has been accused of using chemical weapons and targeting civilian areas during a bloody civil war that has lasted more than a decade,” the Post writes.
Al Jaber has rejected accusations of a conflict of interest, and COP 28 CEO Adnan Amin said the fossil CEO’s dual role at the top of both ADNOC and Masdar makes him uniquely qualified to chair the COP. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry has endorsed al Jaber as a “terrific choice”, and Frans Timmermans, the EU executive VP leading the European Green Deal, declared him “extremely well placed to lead us into a successful COP.”
That was before al Jaber made his pitch for distinguishing between phasing out fossil fuel emissions and phasing out fossil fuels, during the annual Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin earlier this month. “We must be laser focused on phasing out fossil fuel emissions, while phasing up viable, affordable, zero-carbon alternatives,” he declared.
That language “was widely interpreted to mean using carbon capture and storage technology to capture CO2 emissions, and not completely phasing out fossil fuels themselves,” the Guardian reported. The problem with that frame is that carbon capture technology is still far from being ready for widespread affordable use, at a time when countries are on a tight deadline to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions 45% by 2030.
In its massive synthesis report released in late March, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cited solar, wind, and methane reductions in oil and gas as the most promising pathways to faster, deeper emission cuts by 2030, largely at a cost below US$20 per tonne of carbon dioxide or equivalent. A chart toward the end of the synthesis report showed CCS delivering about one-tenth the benefit at far higher cost. Nuclear, geothermal, hydropower, and electricity from biomass did not much better.
Yesterday’s parliamentarians’ letter also focuses in on efforts to limit corporate influence in COP negotiations, beginning with mid-year Subsidiary Body sessions convening in Bonn, Germany next month. It asks the UN climate secretariat to require that participating companies “submit an audited corporate political influencing statement that discloses climate-related lobbying, campaign contributions, and funding of trade associations and organizations active on energy and climate issues. These statements should be reviewed, publicly disclosed, and scrutinized prior to any engagement” in COP processes.
“It did not escape our attention that at least 636 lobbyists from the oil and gas industries registered to attend last year’s COP—an increase of more than 25% over the previous year,” the legislators wrote. “When the number of attendees representing polluting corporate actors, which have a vested financial interest in maintaining the status quo, is larger than the delegations of nearly every country in attendance, it is easy to see how their presence could obstruct climate action.”
And indeed, last year’s negotiations in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt “ultimately failed to secure consensus from Parties to cut greenhouse gases in line with the agreed global goals,” the letter adds.
The legislators noted that the fossil industry has “known about the dangers of climate change posed by its products” since at least the 1960s. Yet “over a half century later, not one of 39 major global oil and gas companies, with collective market capitalization of $3.7 trillion, has adopted a business strategy that would limit warming to safe levels,” despite “blockbuster profits” totalling $4 trillion last year.
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