The appointment of Sultan Al-Jaber, head of the oil company ADNOC, as president of the next climate summit continues to cause a stir. Indeed, oil is one of the main causes of global warming.
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Posted on 5/23/2023 7:36 PM Updated on 5/23/2023 7:57 PM
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COP28 President Sultan Al-Jaber on May 10, 2023 in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates). (KARIM SAHIB / AFP)
They don’t want this president. Hundreds of elected officials in the US Congress and European Parliament on Tuesday, May 23 called for the withdrawal of an oil industry chief’s nomination to chair the next COP28, an annual meeting to combat global warming, in Dubai. “We urge you to urge the United Arab Emirates to renounce the appointment of Sultan Al-Jaber,” they write, expressing their “deep concern.” Along with coal and gas, oil is the main cause of global warming caused by human activities.
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The letter is addressed to US President Joe Biden, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of UN Climate, is also an award winner. The appointment of this forty-something, Emirati Minister of Industry and head of the oil giant ADNOC, as chairman of the UN climate conference planned for the end of 2023 had already been heavily criticized by a hundred NGOs in January.
These elected officials want to limit “the impact of polluting industries.”
In their letter, the elected officials also called for “limiting the influence of polluting industries” on these climate meetings and deplored the importance of lobbying. “We cannot allow special interests to create more obstacles in the race against climate change,” tweeted Sheldon Whitehouse, one of the most committed US senators on climate issues. In Brussels, this letter was signed by 99 ecologist MEPs from the Left and Center-Left parties.
When questioned by AFP in April, Sultan Al-Jaber defended himself by recalling that he was also the founder of Masdar, an Emirates national giant specializing in renewable energy, and that he had assured that his country had been “more than twenty years” I’ve been working on the energy transition for years”.
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