The oil and gas CEO at the helm of this year’s United Nations climate talks was still a lightning rod for objections, global carbon dioxide levels hit a record high, and delegates couldn’t even agree on an agenda as 10 days of mid-year negotiations got off to a rocky start in Bonn, Germany this week.
With the annual UN climate summit typically scheduled in November of December, the smaller mid-year meetings in May are seen as an important opportunity to thrash out technical issues underlying the COP agenda—issues like climate finance, a funding mechanism for loss and damage, the path to a fossil fuel phaseout, and this year’s Global Stock Take (GST), a mandated COP “moment” to assess countries’ progress in meeting their targets under the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
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But “despite months of discussions since the previous COP 27 in Egypt, there was no agreement on adopting the agendas proposed by the COP permanent subsidiary bodies for the Bonn conference,” Reuters reports, citing opening remarks by Pakistani climate minister Nabeel Munir, chair of UN Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI). Yet “making as much progress as possible in Bonn in the coming 10 days is important as the conference, with 200 countries’ representatives, sets the technical groundwork for the political decisions required in Dubai later this year,” when delegates gather for COP 28.
UN climate secretary Simon Stiell said COP 28 could still be a significant moment to get countries back on track with their climate commitments. “What we experienced today… with the non-adoption of the agenda, it’s not desirable, but it’s not uncommon” given the way the process is designed, he told media Monday.
Tom Evans, a policy advisor at the E3G climate think tank, said consensus on the agenda broke down over an EU measure on emission reductions that posed the question of a fossil fuel phaseout.
“It’s a bit of a warm-up to some of the tension around this question that we could see at COP 28,” Green said.
Fossil Phaseout Tensions
With the largest delegation at the 2021 climate talks in Glasgow, and an even bigger contingent working the hallways and negotiating rooms in Sharm el-Sheikh last year, it isn’t as though the fossil fuel industries have lacked for influence over the COP process. But this year, the direction is coming from the top, after the United Arab Emirates controversially appointed Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of the giant Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), as COP 28 chair.
Al Jaber and his lieutenants have been busy with messaging that tries to separate fossil fuel emissions from fossil fuel production and, in the lead-up to the Bonn talks, arguing that climate solutions will only work if fossil fuel companies are in the conversation.
“We need to have everybody at the table discussing with us about how to deliver,” COP 28 Director General Majid al-Suwaidi told The Associated Press.
“We need to have oil and gas, we need to have industry, we need to have aviation, we need to have shipping, we need to have all the hard-to-abate sectors,” he added. “We need all those who can to deliver what they can, regardless of who they are.”
AP says al-Suwaidi “pushed back against the idea that the fossil fuel industry would undermine meaningful talks on emissions cuts the way they have done in the past through disinformation campaigns” and holding back their own, decades-long knowledge of climate science. “There’s no doubt in my mind that the position of the sector has completely changed and that they are engaging with us in an active conversation,” he told the news agency.
“We know that we’re an oil and gas producing country, we have a COP president who is the CEO of an oil and gas company. We understand why that may appear to people outside as, you know, challenging,” he added. “However, we don’t see it that way.”
Al-Suwaidi maintained the UAE’s COP presidency wouldn’t rule out discussions of a fossil fuel phaseout, one of the high-profile but unsuccessful topics from last year’s COP 27 negotiations. “Our leadership have been very clear to me and our team and our president that they don’t want just another COP that’s incremental,” he said, and “we welcome any kind of discussion.”
But as the Bonn negotiations got under way, much of the focus was on Al Jaber and his connection to one of the world’s biggest state-owned oil and gas companies. “The presidency needs to quickly show where its ambition lies: ramping up the renewables is part of it but recognizing that won’t be enough for this COP,” European Climate Foundation CEO Laurence Tubiana told France 24. She added that it’s critical to “recognize that the fossil era is ending”.
Another Year, Another CO2 Record
The UN meeting was just getting under way just as scientists revealed that average atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have reached another annual high, with measurements in Hawaii coming in at 424 parts per million. “That’s three parts per million more than last year’s May average and 51% higher than pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm,” AP reports. It’s also the third-largest annual increase on record.
“Carbon dioxide levels in the air are now the highest they’ve been in more than four million years because of the burning of oil, coal, and gas,” AP writes. “The last time the air had similar amounts was during a less hospitable hothouse Earth before human civilization took root.”
“To me as an atmospheric scientist, that trend is very concerning,” said Arlyn Andrews, head of the greenhouse gas monitoring group at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which released the latest figures. “Not only is CO2 continuing to increase despite efforts to start reducing emissions, but it’s increasing faster than it was 10 or 20 years ago.”
Against that backdrop, Stiell affirmed that the world must phase out fossil fuels to curb global warming, but said he “couldn’t quite promise it would get a spot on the agenda” at COP 28, AP says. That decision, the UN’s top climate official told the news agency, will ultimately be up to the conference chair.
“It is an issue that has global attention,” Stiell said. “How that translates into an agenda item and a (COP 28) outcome, we will see.”
Human Rights to the Forefront
The other issue coming to the fore as the UAE prepares to host COP 28 is the country’s human rights record. In a recent post for Climate Home News, James Lynch, co-director of human rights organization Fair Square, traces a decade-long effort to “quash domestic dissent” and fund anti-democratic efforts across the Middle East, carried out by a “a borderline totalitarian state whose power and influence is rooted in the extraction of fossil fuels.”
Lynch says he was one of many human rights researchers who were blacklisted from the country. “We watched in dismay as the UAE’s sleek public relations, disinformation, and robust diplomacy cowed the international community into meek submission, leaving it free to export its ruinous model of ‘authoritarian stability’,” he writes. “The UAE will be as fierce in its opposition to climate justice as it has been in its opposition to the most basic human rights. We are already seeing how they will deploy the same tactics to scupper it.”
Lynch goes into detail on what those tactics might look like, beginning with Al Jaber’s persistent claim that the UAE has embraced the energy transition. The reality is that the country’s per capita emissions are among the world’s highest, and Climate Action Tracker rates its climate pledges as “highly insufficient’, its second-worst ranking.
