Four years after taking the World Economic Forum by storm, Greta Thunberg returned to Davos on Thursday to blast the United Arab Emirates for appointing the head of its state-owned oil company to chair the Cop28 climate talks later this year.
Thunberg said it was “completely ridiculous” that Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), would chair the next round of global climate talks in Dubai in November.
She said at an event on the sidelines of the WEF annual meeting in Davos that lobbyists have been influencing these conferences “basically for ages”.
“It puts a very clear face on the whole thing,” she added. “It’s completely ridiculous.”
Luisa Neubauer, a German climate activist, also called the move “ridiculous,” but not a new development as lobbyists flocked to Egypt’s latest cop meeting.
Helena Gualinga, from an indigenous community in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador, said the UAE’s move sends a message that the climate issue is not being taken seriously.
“I just think it sends a message of where we’re going right now when we put fossil fuel company leaders to lead the climate negotiations,” Gualinga said.
In November, ADNOC’s board of directors decided to bring forward its goal of expanding its oil production from 2030 to 5 million barrels per day by 2027 to meet increasing global energy needs.
Responding to activists’ comments, a Cop28 spokesman insisted that al-Jaber – who founded the renewable energy company Masdar in 2006 – was “uniquely qualified to deliver a successful Cop28”.
Cop28’s spokesman said: “Dr. Sultan is an energy expert and founder of one of the world’s leading renewable energy companies, a senior business leader, a government minister and a climate diplomat with over 20 years of climate action experience.”
Thunberg also called on fossil fuel bosses to immediately stop opening new fossil fuel mining sites.
A “cease and desist” order signed by Thunberg and Ugandan activists Gualinga, Neubauer and Vanessa Nakate says Big Oil has known for decades that fossil fuels are causing climate change and has misled the public and deceived politicians.
“You must stop these activities as they directly violate our human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, your duty of care and the rights of indigenous peoples,” the statement said.
The people who are primarily driving the destruction of the planet, who are at the heart of the climate crisis and who are investing in fossil fuels are in Davos, Thunberg said.
“And yet, somehow, these are the people that we seem to rely on to solve our problems, where they’ve proven time and time again that they don’t prioritize that,” she said. “They prioritize self-greed, corporate greed and short-term economic gains over people and over the planet.”
Thunberg said it was “absurd” to listen to these people and not those on the front lines of the climate crisis.
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Nakate said the climate crisis is evident in hard-hit areas, such as the Horn of Africa, where children suffer from severe, acute malnutrition.
The quartet was joined by Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency.
In 2021, the IEA said that if the world is to reach the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, exploration and development of new oil and gas fields would need to stop that year.
On Thursday, Birol said he was “very happy” that activists are pushing the climate agenda.
Birol warned that it might not make sense for banks to fund new fossil fuel projects.
When asked about the banks funding new oil and gas production despite their net-zero pledges, Birol said it was “their money,” not the IEA’s. But there was a risk that demand might not be there when new oil fields come on line, perhaps six or seven years after the decision to drill was made.
In 2019, Thunberg warned Davos delegates that “our house is on fire” after taking a 32-hour train ride to the ski resort and camping with climate scientists on the mountain slopes – where temperatures plummeted to -18C fell.