TICK TOCK THE CLIMATE CLOCK – PART 47—COP OUT28

Yesterday the 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), commonly known as COP28, opened in Dubai (above).  This year, the global meeting might more accurately be called COP OUT28.

The BBC reported last Friday that the UAE host and conference president for this year’s summit, Dr. Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber (below), the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) (!!!), the twelfth largest oil company in the world according to Wikipedia, saw the conference as an excellent opportunity to sell his nation’s oil and gas.  The BBC story was picked up, and confirmed, by Politico and the New York Times earlier this week.  Like an extreme climate event, it created quite a firestorm.

COP28’s focus this year is supposed to be about climate inequality and the continuing 31-year-long (!!!) discussion of how to reduce carbon emissions in order to hold global temperatures to not more than 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial levels.  But this year that climate goal took a backseat to deal-making in Dubai.  From the BBC report:

The United Arab Emirates planned to use its role as the host of UN climate talks as an opportunity to strike oil and gas deals, the BBC has learned.

Leaked briefing documents reveal plans to discuss fossil fuel deals with 15 nations.

The UN body responsible for the COP28 summit told the BBC hosts were expected to act without bias or self-interest.

The UAE team did not deny using COP28 meetings for business talks, and said "private meetings are private".

It declined to comment on what was discussed in the meetings and said its work has been focused on "meaningful climate action".

If by “meaningful,” the UAE team meant using COP28 to extend "Brand Dubai", then yes, definitely meaningful in a Gilded Age kind of way.  But Brand Dubai isn’t just about glitz and glamor, it’s also about pumping more and more oil. 

Last year, shortly after Cop27 ended, the board of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) voted to bring forward their planned 5m barrel a day oil production capacity expansion to 2027, three years ahead of schedule.

In July, it reached 4.5m barrels a day. An expanse of solar panels south of Dubai reportedly provides 15% of the emirate’s energy needs, but oil and gas remain the bedrock of its energy supply and business.

The BBC report includes images of “the documents--obtained by independent journalists at the Centre for Climate Reporting working alongside the BBC --prepared by the UAE's COP28 team for meetings with at least 27 foreign governments ahead of the COP28 summit.”  They demonstrate just how eager the UAE is to grow its oil business.

Below is an image of the talking points memo prepared for the UAE’s COP28 meeting with China’s climate delegate.

Below is an image of the talking points memo prepared for the UAE’s COP28 meeting with Brazil’s climate delegate.

Below is an image of the talking points memo prepared for the UAE’s COP28 meeting with the UK’s climate delegate.

Of the briefing memos prepared for the UAE’s climate team, Politico notes:

Germany, for example, is to be told that …ADNOC…"stand[s] ready to expand LNG supplies to Germany."

They also propose telling oil-rich giants Saudi Arabia and Venezuela that "there is no conflict between sustainable development of any country's natural resources and its commitment to climate change."

The briefing documents imaged in the BBC report are undated and it appears they were prepared for COP28 pre-meetings held in Abu Dhabi, the UAE government seat and where most of the oil lies.   As reported in the Times, China took part in a “Pre-COP” ministerial event in Abu Dhabi in late October, and the Brazilian environment ministry met with the UAE in August and September.

It seems that, rather than build a firewall to separate the climate conference from fossil fuel negotiations, as required by UN protocol, Sultan al-Jaber threw up some pretty pink window dressing.  UN officials were furious, as the New York Times reports:

“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.

No doubt.

Bending over backwards to try to be fair, the Times quibbles,

Still, it remains unclear how many of the talking points were ultimately raised at meetings. A spokesperson for the Brazilian environment ministry said that Ms. Silva never discussed these matters when she met with the U.A.E. in August and September. The Chinese, Egyptian, German and Kenyan delegations didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Uh huh.  Well, I have a comment:  It takes two to tango.  I wager Sultan al-Jaber had plenty of dance partners from the US, EU, and other oil and gas importing countries eager to take a spin around his desert dance floor.

But cynical, climate-defeating, brand-enhancing self-dealing isn’t the only reason to call this summit COP OUT28.  There is also the issue of the UAE’s profligate abuse of water, and the presence of the “polluter elite” at the summit.  First, the water issue.

When the climate delegates stepped off their planes yesterday—private jets and otherwise—they encountered what the Times dubbed Dubai's Costly Water World, and which sounds to me like Las Vegas on the Gulf:

For a desert city, Dubai appears like a water wonderland. Visitors can scuba dive in the world’s deepest pool or ski inside a megamall where penguins play in freshly made snow. A fountain — billed as the world’s largest — sprays more than 22,000 gallons of water into the air, synchronized to music from surrounding speakers.

But to maintain its opulence, the city relies on fresh water it doesn’t have. So it turns to the sea, using energy-intensive desalination technologies to help hydrate a rapidly growing metropolis.

The climate delegates would have passed through DBX airport.  Below is an image of the interior waterfall at Dubai Mall, located inside the airport.   (The cargo depot is further below.)

Actually, the entire airport is a mall, and an extremely brightly-lit one at that.  DBX resembles DOH, Qatar's airport in Doha, except that DBX is even bigger.  We were at DOH last summer on our way back to Berlin from Namibia.  When we arrived at 1:30 a.m., the airport was as bright as an operating theater and packed with shoppers, just like the photo above.  The tarmac complex was HUGE!  It took literally 20 minutes to travel by bus from where our plane parked to get to the airport terminal.  DBX is even bigger than DOH, so ground transport requires even more fuel and more carbon emissions.  But that’s all part of "Brand Dubai": 

The foundations of the UAE’s economy are entirely fossil-fuel reliant – there’s a direct connection through oil and gas, but the aviation industry as well as the shipping and logistics industries are heavily reliant on oil too. Everything is about the consumption of fossil fuels for additional purposes – to the extent that life and society in the UAE are not just dependent on oil economically, but because of the climate there, all food and provisions have to be imported.

Returning to the water issue, just how much fresh water does Dubai use?  The Times says, a lot:

The city desalinated approximately 163.6 billion gallons of water last year, according to the sustainability report. For each gallon of desalinated water produced in the gulf, an average of a gallon and a half of brine is released into the ocean.

That brine is a real problem, too.  It further raises the salinity of the already salty Gulf, destroying coral reefs that attract not just fish but also tourists, and causing red algae blooms that not only kill fish but also Brand Dubai as a beach vacation destination.

Desalination of sea water also requires a lot of energy.  From the Times:

In Dubai, the Jebel Ali Power and Desalination Complex — the largest facility of its kind in the world — pipes water from the sea, sending it through a series of treatment phases, then to the city as drinkable water. But Jebel Ali’s 43 desalination plants are powered by fossil fuels. The United Arab Emirates produced more than 200 million tons of carbon in 2022, among the highest emissions per capita worldwide.

That's Jebel Ali above.  

So, hey, Dubai seems like the perfect place to host COP OUT28, no?  It’s a two-fer—water pollution and carbon emissions on the one hand and glitz for the rich (like the Moon Resort below) on the other. 

Which brings us to the second reason this year’s climate summit deserves the name COP OUT28:  the presence of the “polluter elite.”  The term was coined in the Oxfam Report,  whose main finding is that the richest 1% of the world’s population produced as much carbon pollution in one year as the five billion people who make up the poorest 66%.

This income divide translates into a carbon divide, an inequity that produces anxiety among the polluter elite and the victims of climate change.  As described in the Guardian:

Climate anxiety means different things to different income groups. At the bottom, it means fear of heat and floods. At the top, it means fear of increasingly desperate people. Billionaires often live in protective bubbles maintained at a considerable cost in dollars and emissions.

Climate migration has become a thing, and some creative immigration lawyers in the US are using it as a new approach to validating asylum claims: 

The number of asylum cases pending in U.S. immigration courts has surpassed one million, up from about 750,000 in 2022, and from barely 110,000 a decade ago. Another one million cases being assessed by asylum officers are also pending, more than double the number two years ago.

As the number of claims swell, so do questions about the very meaning of asylum in the 21st century, for the United States and for the millions of people around the world seeking safe haven, increasingly because of the effects of extreme weather and climate change.

Climate migration may be part of the reason this year’s summit has produced a tangible result, albeit one dripping with corporate green washing, but I imagine refurbishing the sullied Brand Dubai also played a big part.  As reported in Reuters at the opening of the summit:

The United Arab Emirates is preparing to announce a new $30 billion climate-focused investment fund during COP28 with backing from some of the world's biggest investors including BlackRock (BLK.N), three sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

The sources said the UAE would provide the bulk of the money and private equity firm TPG and infrastructure investor Brookfield would also be involved. Two sources said the money would be overseen by UAE-backed investor Lunate Capital.

A second source said BlackRock, TPG and Brookfield would allocate money currently housed in other funds to the UAE fund and that talks over the fund began after the summer and carried on through October.

As hosts of the COP28 climate conference in Dubai that kicked off on Thursday, the UAE has drawn criticism for its plans to expand oil and gas production as the world struggles to rein in the climate-damaging carbon emissions they produce.

Against that backdrop, the UAE has been keen to encourage finance and business more broadly to commit more money to the climate fight and was expected to open its own chequebook throughout the two-week event.

So much easier to open your wallets than to risk climate barbarians opening the security gates.  From the Guardian:

Delegates at Cop28 need only step out of the security gates of the conference centre in Dubai to witness the carbon divide. The United Arab Emirates is one of the world’s most unequal nations, largely as a result of the wealth that its rulers have accumulated from pumping oil and gas out of the desert, and the poor conditions of the migrant workers who make up 80% of the population.

Its ruler, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, is the scion of arguably the richest family on the planet. By one estimate, the Al Nahyan clan, who own 6% of the world’s oil reserves, are worth more than $300bn. The family’s climate footprint from investments is similarly spectacular. The Al Nahyan royals control International Holding Co, which owns stakes in, among other things, Manchester City football club, a Formula One racetrack, the Ferrari World indoor theme park, the spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX, large chunks of London’s Berkeley Square and a dozen or so palaces. This month, it raised its stake in the Indian coal mining company Adani Enterprises. It recently had the fastest-growing stock valuation in the world – 28,000% in just five years.

UAE billionaires like the Sheik (above) and the Sultan will be with “their kind” at the climate summit: Climate elites from around the world, the actual decision makers, the politicians, the CEOs, and the bankers, have gathered in Dubai for COP OUT28.  From the Guardian:

The Oxfam report reveals that the decision-making classes who will dominate at Cop28 – senior politicians including US senators, British ministers and European commissioners – are also in the top 1% of income earners. Corporate CEOs, whose lobbyists also flock to Cop summits, are often wealthier and more heavily invested in carbon assets. Boardroom share options and bonus structures have created an incentive for oil company executives to resist climate action.

Let’s hope these decision makers do more than exchange stock tips, sell oil and financial products in the back room, and burnish their tarnished political images. 

When you think about who is in the proverbial room, you have to ask yourself a few questions:  Whose interests do these decision makers actually serve?  How much have they accomplished since the first climate summit in Rio de Janeiro 31 years ago?  And is it naïve to think political means are possible to achieve climate adaptation --a wealth tax, or a windfall profit tax on polluting corporations, or strong environmental legislation--when the politicians and their donors are incentivized to keep the status quo?  Isn’t COP28 really COP OUT28?

I sometimes wonder if these climate summits are just so much hot air--the hottest air on record last year, by the way, according to a story in yesterday’s New York Times:

This year is “virtually certain” to be the hottest year in recorded history, the World Meteorological Organization announced on Thursday at COP28, the United Nations climate summit in Dubai where delegates from nearly 200 countries, including many heads of state and government, have gathered.

The organization said 2023 has been about 1.4 degrees Celsius, or about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit, above the global average preindustrial temperature from 1850 to 1990. The past nine years have been the warmest nine in 174 years of recorded scientific observations, with the previous single-year records set in 2020 and 2016. This comes in addition to record greenhouse gas concentrations, sea levels and concentrations of methane.

Keep it real!

Marilyn