How Does a Fossil Fuel CEO Deliver a Win at COP28?
I posted this meme today to one of my FB groups. Then, later on, I was wondering if there was any truth to it. Before I had a chance to fact-check, the Energy Mix came in with this article by Mitchell Beer.
For one brief, surreal moment, it almost looked like Sultan Al Jaber could get a deal done. But the voluntary pledges fell far short, and then the COP28 President himself burst the bubble.
It was a surreal yet weirdly compelling, almost convincing moment: 50 mammoth fossil fuel businesses pledging to essentially phase out methane emissions and end routine gas flaring by 2030.
For half an hour on a livestream from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, you could almost believe: that COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), was serious about bringing his peers to the table and had the clout to get the deal done.
The Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter immediately ran into scorching criticism from a list of 320 civil society organizations, led by Oil Change International. The groups pointed out that a “robust negotiated energy package” by the end of this year’s COP28 negotiations in the United Arab Emirates would have to include “an unambiguous agreement to end all new oil and gas expansion” and a “clear call to equitably and rapidly phase out all fossil fuels,” along with a renewable energy and energy efficiency pledge that was announced in tandem with the oil and gas charter.
“What we’ve done already is shown that we deliver action,” when “nobody expected that we’d be able to do that,” an exuberant COP28 Director General, Majid Al Suwaidi, said Saturday. A 1.5°C threshold for average global warming “has been our north star from the very beginning,” he added, “and we’ve taken that in a very systematic way.”
The day’s decarbonization promises, coupled with the methane pledge from China and the United States leading up to the COP, could make Saturday, December 2 “the most impactful day of announcements” in nearly 30 years of COP negotiations, said Fred Krupp, president of the U.S. Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). “This new initiative, if, if, the commitments are met, has the potential to reduce methane emissions by each of the companies signing up by an average of 80-90%.”
Then today, the two news agencies revealed Al Jaber’s curious view that there’s “no science” to support a fossil fuel phaseout as an essential part of the fight to hold average global warming to 1.5°C.
“I accepted to come to this meeting to have a sober and mature conversation,” Al Jaber replied, in what the Guardian called an “ill-tempered” response. “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 the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5°C.” |Read more https://energymixweekender.substack.com/p/how-does-a-fossil-fuel-ceo-deliver | energymixweekender.substack.co…
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