Is United Arab Emirates & international fossil fuel industry scheming about to turn UN COP28 into a crime against humanity?

Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber is a 50 year old Emirati politician with a undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering, a Master in Business Administration and a PhD in Business and Economics. 

His studies appear to have been funded by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) - a state-owned multinational corporation of which he is currently Director-General & Chief Executive Officer. ADNOC is considered one of the world's largest energy companies measured by both fossil fuel reserves and production.

Critics tend to characterise ADNOC under his guidance as a corporation which focuses on 'greenwashing' rather than genuine greenhouse gas emissions reduction/climate change mitigation.

Al Jaber is currently the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology.

He is also President of the 28th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) which is being hosted by oil-rich UAE and therein lies an immense conflict of interest which has the potential to fatally weaken the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

COP28 was convened for thirteen days with around 199 nations participating and concludes on Tuesday 12 December 2023. 

AlJazeera, 8 December 2023:

The head of OPEC has urged members to reject any COP28 agreement that “targets” fossil fuels, highlighting deep divisions as the UN climate conference in Dubai enters its final week.

A new draft of the final agreement published on Friday includes a range of options, from agreeing to a “phase out of fossil fuels in line with best available science”, to phasing out “unabated fossil fuels”, to including no language on them at all....

The nearly 200 nations gathered in Dubai are now expected to focus on the issue of fossil fuels in the hope of reaching a consensus before the gathering’s scheduled end......

The most vocal holdout to calls to end fossil fuels is Saudi Arabia, which like summit host United Arab Emirates, is a major oil producer.....

TheGuardian, 3 December 2023:

The president of Cop28, Sultan Al Jaber, has claimed there is “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C, the Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting can reveal.

Al Jaber also said a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves”.

The comments were “incredibly concerning” and “verging on climate denial”, scientists said, and they were at odds with the position of the UN secretary general, António Guterres.

Al Jaber made the comments in ill-tempered responses to questions from Mary Robinson, the chair of the Elders group and a former UN special envoy for climate change, during a live online event on 21 November. As well as running Cop28 in Dubai, Al Jaber is also the CEO of the United Arab Emirates’s state oil company, Adnoc, which many observers see as a serious conflict of interest.

More than 100 countries already support a phase-out of fossil fuels and whether the final Cop28 agreement calls for this or uses weaker language such as “phase-down” is one of the most fiercely fought issues at the summit and may be the key determinant of its success. Deep and rapid cuts are needed to bring fossil fuel emissions to zero and limit fast-worsening climate impacts.....

Guterres told Cop28 delegates on Friday: “The science is clear: The 1.5C limit is only possible if we ultimately stop burning all fossil fuels. Not reduce, not abate. Phase out, with a clear timeframe.”.......

Newsweek, 1 December 2023:

The annual United Nations climate summit started yesterday. We're up to the 28th edition: "COP28." Past UN summits have obviously failed us, but this is a new low. Everyone on Earth needs to know that the meeting has been overrun by fossil fuel executives, making it a sick, planet-destroying joke. There's no real hope of stopping catastrophic global heating until we fix this.

The primary cause of global heating is fossil fuels; and global heating is what's driving all the crazy heat, fire, smoke, storms, flooding, drought, crop yield losses, and ecosystem death that is intensifying everywhere as Earth breaks down. This is basic physics and it's merciless. If left unchecked, every year on average will be hotter than the last, and at some point—no one knows exactly when or how it will unfold—global heating will take down civilization as we know it. Billions of lives are at risk, and the damage to Earth's habitability will last for so long that it will be essentially permanent as far as humans are concerned.

Since fossil fuels are the cause, the only way out of this emergency is to ramp down and ultimately end the fossil fuel industry. Recycling and composting aren't bad things in and of themselves, but they will not stop global heating. The cause is fossil fuels. The only real solution is ending fossil fuels. If you want to help, and you should, forget recycling. Instead, fight the fossil fuel industry every way you can.

It's easy to imagine an alternate universe in which fossil fuel executives were like, "We already have more money than we know what to do with, so let's not destroy the planet." In this alternate universe, the fossil fuel industry uses its vast power and resources to accelerate humanity's transition to clean energy, so we can all have a planet to live on. Makes sense.

In reality of course, fossil fuel executives made the opposite choice: to spend billions to hire the best and brightest to spread disinformation and block action. Which is sad, and horrible, and nightmarish. They've been doing this for half a century. And they recently promised to keep doing it.

In 2021, six fossil fuel executives testified before congress. They were Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil; Michael Wirth, CEO of Chevron; David Lawler, CEO of BP America; Gretchen Watkins, president of Shell Oil; Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute; and Suzanne Clark, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. When asked in several instances by Congress if they would agree to stop spending to spread disinformation and block climate action, these fossil fuel executives refused. They clearly signaled to the world that they plan to blithely continue dishonestly destroying Earth's habitability for the sake of corporate greed. They are literal supervillains, stealing our future.

This year, 2023, is the hottest in recorded human history. This should surprise no one: global heating is driven inexorably by trending accumulation of fossil fuel carbon dioxide and methane emissions. In this hottest year in human history, the climate summit is being held in the United Arab Emirates and presided over by a fossil fuel chief executive named Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber. It's hard to imagine anything more cynical or more evil. And yet, things did get more cynical and more evil, with recent revelations that the U.A.E. has been abusing its host role to strike side deals to expand fossil fuels......

Read the full article by Dr. Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at:

https://www.newsweek.com/climate-summit-sick-joke-you-should-angry-afraid-opinion-1848719

The New York Times (Late Edition), 29 November 2023:

A leaked document has talking points for the president of the United Nations climate conference, who is an oil executive in the United Arab Emirates, to advance oil and gas deals.

As the host of global climate talks that begin this week, the United Arab Emirates is expected to play a central role in forging an agreement to move the world more rapidly away from coal, oil and gas.

But behind the scenes, the Emirates has sought to use its position as host to pursue a contradictory goal: to lobby on oil and gas deals around the world, according to an internal document made public by a whistle-blower.

In one example, the document offers guidance for Emirati climate officials to use meetings with Brazil's environment minister to enlist her help with a local petrochemical deal by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the Emirates' state-run oil and gas company, known as Adnoc.

Emirati officials should also inform their Chinese counterparts that Adnoc was "willing to jointly evaluate international LNG opportunities" in Mozambique, Canada and Australia, the document indicates. LNG stands for liquefied natural gas, which is a fossil fuel and a driver of global warming.

These and other details in the nearly 50-page document -- obtained by the Centre for Climate Reporting and the BBC -- have cast a pall over the climate summit, which begins on Thursday. They are indications, experts said, that the U.A.E. is blurring the boundary between its powerful standing as host of the United Nations climate conference, and U.A.E.'s position as one of the world's largest oil and gas exporters.

"I can't believe it," António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary General, said at a news conference Monday. The U.A.E. had been "caught red-handed," Christiana Figueres, a former United Nations diplomat posted on X. Ms. Figueres led the negotiations that yielded the 2015 Paris Agreement, the pact among nations of the world to work to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

"At this point we might as well meet inside an actual oil refinery," said Joseph Moeono-Kolio, lead adviser to the campaign for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, an advocacy network.

Members of Emirates' climate delegation didn't respond to requests for comment.....

Cartoons of the Week

 

Jon Kudelka

Peter Broelman

Are multinational fossil fuel corporations leading Australian governments & regulators by the nose?

 

By the time Word War II drew to a close 77 years ago the world geopolitical map saw Australia identified not just as an existing state within the United Kingdom's wider economic zone, but as a prospective permanent political and economic client state of other Big Powers. Its natural resources to be harvested by fossil fuel corporations & extractive industries, exploited by foreign investors and its population a reliable supplier of future cannon fodder in support of their individual and sometimes joint global ambitions.

For her part, Australia would present as obligingly grateful for being treated as a commodity 'owned' by the wealthy top percentile of the northern hemisphere and the largest transnationals.

Nothing much appears to have changed since then…..

The Saturday Paper, 7 January 2023:

A United States congressional committee investigating fossil fuel disinformation has published internal documents on a major Australian fossil fuel project – described by energy multinational Chevron as “an Australian icon” – in what has become the investigation’s final publication before Republicans took control of congress on Tuesday.

The second and final memo, released by the US house oversight and reform committee, includes information from internal documents subpoenaed by the committee about Chevron’s plans to extract gas from its Gorgon project on Barrow Island, off the coast of Western Australia, beyond 2056. The committee included Gorgon as an example of how the industry is “doubling down on long-term fossil fuel investments” while publicly claiming that gas is “merely a ‘bridge fuel’ ” to cleaner energy in spite of scientists’ “significant concerns about continued reliance on natural gas in a warming climate”.

The committee released memos in September and December last year, alongside thousands of pages of internal documents subpoenaed from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and the American Petroleum Institute. A sixth subpoena issued to the American Chamber of Commerce did not result in any documents being provided.

The two memos include references to the Australian activities of three of the four big oil companies it investigated – BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil – however, the December 2022 memo includes a particularly detailed focus on the Gorgon project, a joint venture led by Chevron, with partners including Shell and ExxonMobil.

According to the committee, the documents reveal that Chevron “is prepared to swoop in and expand its own fossil fuel business … even if other companies ultimately agree to reduce oil and gas production …”

In total, more than 200 of the 589 pages of Chevron documents published by the committee in December relate to Chevron’s operations in Australia, although many are covered almost completely by black boxes. The documents include a heavily redacted 179-page binder provided to Chevron board members visiting Australia and the Gorgon project in 2016, including details ranging from cultural advice on how to order a flat white to information on Chevron’s long-term ambitions for what it is describing as the “largest single-resource development in Australia’s history”.

According to the committee, internal documents shared with the board by then chief executive John S. Watson “emphasize” Chevron’s “long-term intentions for [Gorgon], despite climate concerns” and “the profits Chevron predicts it will reap”…...

Of the unredacted pages related to Chevron’s Gorgon trip, some are less pertinent than others. A cultural information section explains how light mocking should be considered “friendly banter” and not “an insult”. A rare unredacted section of the agenda shows the executives, directors and spouses were scheduled to receive a two-hour overview of Australian politics from Peter van Onselen, who is introduced as contributing editor at The Australian.

The December 2022 memo was not the first time the Gorgon project attracted the committee’s attention. Its September 2022 memo noted a carbon capture and storage facility at Gorgon that had “repeatedly failed to meet its storage target by about 50%” as an example of problems with that technology.

Another Australian example included in the December memo relates to BP’s strategies towards working with regulators here. A 2016 email from a BP executive to John Mingé, chairman and president of BP America, compares the company’s mindset in engaging with regulators in countries including Australia, the US and Germany.

The email describes how BP had gained an “advantaged position” with the regulator of its Australian oil refinery by engaging “proactively”. According to the internal memo, BP documents provided to the committee “show BP executives acknowledging that the company’s actions are often obstructionist towards the development of climate policy”.

Overall, the internal documents, along with further scientific sources cited by the memo, reveal that many of the public claims made by fossil fuel companies have been intentionally misleading.

As the committee’s then chair, Carolyn Maloney, said at a hearing in February: the investigation revealed that ExxonMobil scientists knew about the dangers of fossil fuels in 1978, and in the decades since, the fossil fuel industry has “waged a multimillion-dollar disinformation campaign” to prevent climate action, “all to protect its bottom line”…..

On December 25, journalist Amy Westervelt reported that, contrary to previous plans stated by the committee during its term, the December 9 memo may be the last document it publishes.

That same week, the new chair of the Democratic minority in the house oversight committee, Jamie Raskin, shared that he had been diagnosed with lymphoma.

The committee’s work being abruptly curtailed after only 18 months contrasts with the long-term time scales of the companies it is investigating, such as Chevron’s plans to secure profits beyond 2050. The Saturday Paper put a request for comment to Chevron but did not hear back before going to press.

Although the committee’s investigation is on hold, the US is significantly in front of Australia in its attempts to hold fossil fuel companies accountable.

Last month, Puerto Rico became the latest US jurisdiction to file climate accountability lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, joining dockets filed by seven US states and at least 35 municipal governments.

Puerto Rico – an unincorporated territory of the US in the Caribbean, where storms made worse by climate change have caused major recent disasters – is the first to use the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act in its climate fraud case against Shell and other companies.

According to Wiles, it could be a “big loss” for these cases if the million pages held by the committee “never see the light of day”.

“The documents that have been released so far definitely provide new evidence on the side of the plaintiffs against the defendants.”

In Australia there are currently at least two court cases related to so-called greenwashing making their way through courts, including one case lodged by the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility.

In 2022, two Australian regulators, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, announced plans to investigate greenwashing using existing laws.

Considering the memo’s revelation that BP has internally described its more proactive approach of working with regulators in Australia, it is unclear to what extent regulators alone can address the industry’s influence…..

BACKGROUND

North Coast Voices:

Friday, 6 January 2023

Global oil and gas industries make a combined US$4 billion in profit a day (or US$1 trillion annually) & have done so for the past 50 years. That obscene wealth is thought to be how these industries induce politicians & governments to only pay lip service

Monday, 2 January 2023

Who is undermining Australia’s climate change mitigation goals? Listing lobbyists contracted to act on behalf of fossil fuel industries