This year’s COP28 summit will take place in the United Arab Emirates petrostate and will be headed up by the CEO of an oil company, Sultan Al Jaber. Colin Redmond calls this farce out for what it is and argues for a boycott of the summit.
In November of this year, Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. is to preside over the United Nations COP28 climate talks 2023, as President-Designate. It will take place in Dubai, UAE. While sitting in the driving seat of a company that is soon set to expand its daily production from approximately four millions barrels of crude oil five million, Al Jaber will be steering the COP’s narratives on the merits of a gentle but inevitable global decarbonisation process. He simultaneously presides over Dubai’s renewable energy efforts that spend billions globally on green tech, which has led him to be appointed as UAE’s climate change specialist envoy.
It makes for a supremely arrogant and primary example of hypocrisy. This attempt by the UN to greenwash a petrostate that is also considered substandard in terms of civil liberties and human rights should be called out for what it is; a disaster.
Overall, there is a concern from degrowth environmentalists and eco-socialists everywhere that the influence of private fossil fuel companies on climate conferences is growing. Al Jaber will be the first CEO to ever hold the role of COP President. This makes a mockery of the entire ethos and integrity that the UN proclaims to have around genuine climate concerns and their supposed wish to move away from fossil fuels. Last year, the UAE sent 1,000 delegates to COP27, the largest amount from any one country. The delegation included representatives from public relations, AI and real estate companies. 70 of these delegates represented oil and gas firms. They addressed an audience promising to reduce carbon emissions, pointing out that by the very virtue of their geology, UAE’s gas and oil is the least carbon-intensive in the world. Did they mean that sand is easier to drill through than rock? Who knows, but the transition away from fossil fuel appears highly unlikely given their current lobbying and expansion activities.
As CEO of UAE Oil aka ADNOC, Al Jaber seems to be mainly campaigning to make UAE oil and gas recognised internationally as a form of clean energy, by promoting bogus solutions to his emissions problem through ‘carbon capture technology.’ While he sits on the board of Emirates Global Aluminium and for good measure, is also chairman of Emirates Development Bank; on the world stage he advances ADNOC’s carbon capture and storage facility. This captures CO2 produced in steel manufacturing, then pumps the gas back into the oilfields to extract more oil. The claim is that the increase in oil and steel production that the system can be offset by default, as it will capture and store more carbon to be recycled back into oil production; 5 million tonnes by 2030 – the equivalent of an imaginary forest, almost a third the size of UAE.
Ireland however, is looking forward to working with the UAE and is currently preparing the most ambitious agreement possible with Al Jaber at COP28. “Ireland stands ready to support the UAE in its endeavours to make COP28 very successful”, stated Minister Josepha Madigan on a visit to the UAE in March 2023 as part of Ireland’s annual St. Patrick’s Festival political doohickie. There was no urgency from the Irish delegate to question Al Jaber on why the UAE is trying to hijack COP28 to serve and widen fossil fuel interests.
A clampdown on the freedom of the press to ask questions about Al Jaber’s role as President-Designate is also becoming noted internationally. There have been incidents of airbrushing out unwanted comments about Al Jaber on Wikipedia, and that there have been multiple fake Twitter profiles made to amplify and promote Al Jaber’s green credentials. There have also been media reports that UAE’s state oil company has been filtering and reading emails coming in and going out of the COP28 climate summit office – a gross offense to a multitude of freedom rights for so many reasons.
Ireland should exercise its political diplomacy, speak out and boycott COP28 in the name of climate action. Here, it could start a proper fight against the impending ecological catastrophe that awaits all of us, especially if the world sees merit in Al Jaber’s technological answer to the continuation of fossil fuel production and consumption. Our actions in this regard would be seen as something that carried a lot of weight globally and so should be acted upon immediately and followed by other nations.
