CAIRO: Oil-rich Gulf states have positioned themselves as each champions of local weather innovation and guardians of fossil gas pursuits – a balancing act consultants warn may derail motion at COP28 in Dubai.
This 12 months’s United Nations local weather summit is being chaired and hosted by the United Arab Emirates, a rustic dubbed “an oil firm with a state hooked up” by one observer who requested anonymity so they may converse freely in regards to the negotiations.
In response to COP28 Director Common Majid Al Suwadi, “the UAE has been a frontrunner relating to local weather change”.
“We’ve got been doing our half,” he mentioned in September.
However one of many “inherent flaws of the COP system” is that nationwide pursuits – significantly the host’s – inevitably affect the result, mentioned Ahmed El Droubi, worldwide campaigns supervisor at Local weather Motion Community.
Certainly, the UAE has appointed Sultan Al Jaber, the top of state-owned oil firm ADNOC, as COP president, drawing protests from environmentalists.
At COP27 in Egypt, the place oil and fuel lobbyists outnumbered most delegations, the ultimate textual content included a last-minute provision to spice up “low-emission power”.
That time period consists of pure fuel, into which Egypt has invested billions of {dollars} lately.
In Dubai, activists anticipate the struggle will likely be even more durable, with the hydrocarbons trade intent on “not simply delaying, denying, diverting significant local weather motion, but in addition greenwashing their polluting work”, Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and the setting at Syracuse College, advised AFP.
With time working out, the stakes are greater than ever at COP28.
To maintain international warming at a mean of 1.5 levels Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, greenhouse fuel emissions should drop 43 per cent by 2030 from 2019 ranges, in keeping with the Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change, the UN’s local weather physique.
“In the mean time, we’re not chopping something, and the state of affairs will get extra pressing yearly,” Karim Elgendy, affiliate fellow at Chatham Home, advised AFP.
DELAY THE “INEVITABLE”
Jaber, who can be the UAE’s local weather envoy and co-founder of state-owned renewable power firm Masdar, will not be the one oil trade veteran on the entrance strains of the local weather struggle.
The European Union’s COP28 delegation is led by Dutch former international minister and ex-Shell worker Wopke Hoekstra, an appointment that has additionally been controversial.
In response to Droubi, regardless of Jaber’s clear “battle of curiosity” as ADNOC chief, he “has really mentioned essentially the most progressive factor of any COP president: That phasing down fossil fuels is inevitable”.
However “inevitable”, Elgendy says, “is a really calculated phrase”.
Within the identify of power market stability, fossil gas giants together with the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the US have argued for continued new investments in hydrocarbons earlier than an eventual transition.
In October, Jaber mentioned “we can not unplug the power system of at the moment earlier than we construct the brand new system of tomorrow”, and inspired activists to separate “actuality from fantasies”.