Essay by Eric Worrall
The big gas COP28 boss expects tangible results and progress reports from the climate communists.
Cop28 president: world needs business mindset to tackle climate crisis
Exclusive: Sultan Al Jaber aims to use UN talks to set out how private sector can limit greenhouse gas emissions
Fiona Harvey Environment editorFri 7 Apr 2023 21.00 AEST
The world needs a “business mindset” to tackle the climate crisis, the president of the next UN climate summit has said.
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“We need a major course correction and a massive effort to reignite progress. This cannot be done by governments alone,” Al Jaber told the Guardian in a rare interview, his first with a global newspaper since taking on the Cop28role.
“The scale of the problem requires everyone working in solidarity. We need partnerships, not polarisation, and we need to approach this with a clear-eyed rationale and executable plan of action,” he said.
“Cop28 is committed to building on the progress made at Cop26 and Cop27 to inject a business mindset, concrete KPIs [key performance indicators, a cornerstone of most commercial strategies] and an ambitious action-oriented agenda.”
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Romain Ioualalen, the global policy manager at the campaign group Oil Change International, said:“This is a truly breathtaking conflict of interest and is tantamount to putting the head of a tobacco company in charge of negotiating an anti-smoking treaty.”
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I find it amusing The Guardian felt the need to explain to readers what a key performance indicator is.
As WUWT recently covered, Sultan Al Jaber is presiding over a major increase in gas production. But in the article above, he also points to his progress building renewable energy in the UAE, which I suspect he plans to showcase at COP28.
Will KPIs for climate communists deliver results? I suspect not. Most of them in my opinion don’t want genuine emissions cuts, they just want to look like they care. Setting firm goals and expecting compliance is a trap many CEOs encounter, when they try to actively manage an organisation of volunteers, when they try to organise people who are not required by an employee relationship to answer to their authority.
Sultan Al Jaber might have been lulled into a false sense of security by his experience of organising climate action in the UAE. Inside the UAE Sultan Al Jaber is a member of the royal family. While the emirates have a centuries old tradition of respecting private property and encouraging commerce, and have been remarkably successful at preserving a balance between government and private interests, anyone living in the emirates still has to listen to and respect the wishes of one of the royals.
Outside the emirates, Sultan Al Jaber doesn’t wield the same level of influence. He has no power to command people from other countries, only to inspire and lead. And this means if someone doesn’t want to abide by his KPIs, or fakes the numbers, he has no real power to call them out. People can choose to simply ignore him if ignoring his requests is convenient, or they can lie about their compliance, and issue strong denials if he objects to those falsehoods.
Having said that, I could be wrong. Sultan Al Jaber has already demonstrated capability as a negotiator, by winning acceptance of his leadership of COP28. The muted public grumbling about the conflict of interest between Al Jaber simultaneously running a major petroleum extraction business, and running a major climate conference, is unlikely to seriously challenge his legitimacy.