The signs pointed to a lukewarm police officer. Instead, it was full of surprises – but is the final fossil fuel deal just a ruse?
Fri Dec 15, 2023 06:00 GMT
Shortly before the crucial final session of the Cop28 climate summit, a seemingly random meeting took place in the heavily guarded VIP lounge next to the main conference hall in Dubai. John Kerry, the US climate envoy, and Sultan Al Jaber, president of Cop28, exchanged warm greetings with Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman Al Saud, Saudi Arabia's energy minister.
It was only a brief encounter, but it sealed a crucial agreement. Saudi Arabia, which has been blocking attempts to include fossil fuels in international climate agreements for 30 years, did not want to stand in the way of this project. Just 24 hours earlier, Al Jaber faced intense pressure from the Saudi delegation to water down the text, according to insiders. Now, for the first time, the archetypal petrostate would enable a global commitment to “divesting” from fossil fuels.
Minutes later, Al Jaber took the stage, where more than 190 countries awaited him. A short announcement and it was done: The 28th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change achieved something that no other climate meeting has achieved. Amid applause and relief, world governments had finally agreed to call on countries to “begin to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a fair, orderly and equitable manner and to accelerate action in this critical decade to… “To achieve net zero by 2050 in line with science”.
Of course, a deal that satisfied Saudi Arabia, the United States and the United Arab Emirates would not please everyone. Indigenous peoples and climate justice groups said it was unjust and unjust. Climate scientists acknowledged the call to move away from fossil fuels was historic but said the deal was too weak to allow the world to keep global warming below the Paris limit of 1.5C. Scientists said the statement was vague, with no targets or dates for emissions cuts, allowing a far larger role for carbon capture than possible and advocating gas as a “transition fuel” when most gas reserves would have to stay in the ground.
The Alliance of Small Island States, countries exposed to flooding of more than 1.5°C, criticized a “litany of loopholes” in the text. There was no attempt to prevent the outcome, but Samoa's Anne Rasmussen, speaking for the group minutes after the deal was decided, made it clear that she felt the agreement did not go far enough: ” We made incremental progress, business as usual, when what we really needed was an exponential change in our actions and support.”
Cop28 participants applaud after the announcement of the consensus reached at the climate summit in Dubai on Wednesday. Photo: Xinhua/Shutterstock
Achim Steiner, the head of the UN development program, said: “Some are understandably frustrated that the agreed wording could have been stronger. But it remains the clearest signal yet that the world is emerging from the fossil fuel era.”
The final agreement also included a $700m (£549m) commitment to “operationalise” a new loss and damage fund aimed at rescuing and rehabilitating poor and vulnerable countries affected by the climate emergency . But this was the only real step in climate finance – the money poor countries need both to transition to low-carbon economies and to adapt to the impacts of the climate crisis. Poor countries in particular were saddened that the promised focus on adaptation was not kept.
Harjeet Singh, strategy director at Climate Action Network International, said: “Developing countries that still rely on fossil fuels for energy, income and jobs do not have robust guarantees of adequate financial support in their urgent and just transition to renewable energy.” The end result is disappointingly insufficient to compel wealthy nations to meet their financial responsibilities, obligations amounting to hundreds of billions.”
However, the commitment to these decisions on fossil fuels will have an impact, said Jennifer Morgan, Germany's climate representative. “Now the signals are clear,” she said. “If you are an investor, the future is renewable. Fossil fuels are stranded assets.”
This is an imperfect and fragile deal, and until the very end there was no guarantee that it would happen. The final declaration was greeted with relief and loud applause in the crowded hall. Simon Stiell, the UN climate chief, hugged a visibly exhausted but beaming Al Jaber on stage. A huge gamble had paid off.
The signs didn't bode well before the summit
Holding a climate summit in one of the world's largest oil and gas producers might have sounded like the punchline to a sick joke. The world is failing to control the climate crisis; Fossil fuel companies enjoyed a record boom after Russia's invasion of Ukraine; and the chances of limiting global warming to the relatively safe limit of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels are now all but eliminated.
Temperatures this year were the hottest on record, but this is expected to be one of the coolest years of the rest of the century. Annual greenhouse gas emissions reached their highest level ever last year. António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, warned: “Humanity has opened the gates of hell.”
The United Arab Emirates, which hosted the summit, further exacerbates the problem. It has the world's sixth-largest oil and gas reserves and its state-owned oil company Adnoc is planning a massive $150 billion expansion.
Al Jaber is managing director of Adnoc. When his appointment as police president was announced in January, activists grumbled. Greta Thunberg called it “completely ridiculous.” Tasneem Essop, the executive director of Climate Action Network International, said: “Failure to step down as CEO would amount to a wholesale takeover of the UN climate negotiations by a petrostate national oil company and its associated fossil fuel lobbyists.”
The Adnoc boss had no such concerns. As a businessman, Al Jaber argued, he was well-suited to bring a can-do mentality to negotiations marked by crushing delays and disappointments. If police wanted to address the causes of the climate crisis, they needed the oil industry at the table.
Cop 28 President Sultan Al Jaber hugs UN climate chief Simon Stiell after a plenary session during the summit. Photo: Martin Divíšek/EPA
It may seem incredible that climate change negotiations do not directly address the issue of fossil fuels, which are the root cause of it.
In 2021, at Cop26 in Glasgow, the dirtiest fossil fuel, coal, was mentioned for the first time in the text of the final agreement. This triumph was short-lived. At Cop27 last year in Sharm El Sheikh, more than 80 countries formed a loose coalition calling for a complete phase-out of all fossil fuels. They have completely failed.
At the start of 2023, it was far from clear that Al Jaber would fare better. Instead of talking about the decline of fossil fuels, he preferred to rave about the rise of renewable energy. Early on, he stated that Cop should set a goal of tripling global renewable energy production and doubling energy efficiency by 2030. (Before taking over his Adnoc role in 2016, Al Jaber co-founded the UAE government-backed renewable energy company Masdar.)
This commitment to renewable energy was seen by many as an intentional replacement for any language about fossil fuels. Al Jaber also spoke enthusiastically about controversial and costly technical solutions, particularly carbon capture and storage, which scientists say can only play a small role in the transition. Instead of calling fossil fuels a problem, he preferred to talk about fossil fuel emissions – a much weaker form of the word.
Al Jaber was also clearly ambivalent about the goal of limiting the temperature rise to 1.5°C. For vulnerable countries, this goal is at the core of the COP. But as recently as May this year, when interviewed in Abu Dhabi about whether the world could stay within the 1.5 target, he said: “I'm honestly not in a position to answer that.” I would mislead you. What I mean to say is that me and the next one [Cop] The president and the one after him should stay focused and do their best.”
This all led to the impression that, beneath his confident and sometimes bombastic public persona, Al Jaber would make a lukewarm police officer. Christiana Figueres, the former U.N. climate chief who chaired the 2015 Paris summit, publicly rebuked him in May for his “very dangerous” stance.
“He tries to dance on two dance floors at the same time. He's trying to say: Look, those of us who produce fossil fuels will be responsible for our emissions through improved carbon capture and storage. And we or the Cop Presidency will also support the carbon-free alternatives,” she said.
When the mid-term meeting took place at the UN climate headquarters in Bonn in June, the signs looked terrible. There was no clear decision about whether fossil fuels should even be on the agenda of the cops themselves. What can you expect, complained critics, when an oilman is in charge?
By the time world leaders arrived in Dubai on November 30 for the opening days of the Cop28 talks, Al Jaber's rhetoric had changed. “[Staying within] 1.5°C is my North Star,” he said at various public meetings. “An exit from fossil fuels is unavoidable and necessary.”
Many developing countries said they had confidence in Al Jaber that, unlike many previous cop presidents, he listened to them and seemed to feel their cause. He undertook an extensive global listening tour, from small islands to the largest economies, meeting indigenous peoples, youth leaders, women and people from disadvantaged communities.
Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, also played a role in eliminating any reliance on CCS, conducting research that found it would cost about $4 trillion a year to use the technology to help businesses for fossil fuels to enable continued operation. CCS is “an illusion, a fantasy,” he told the Guardian, repeating this privately to Al Jaber.
The UAE team recruited a team of experienced consultants. Above all, the United Nations intervened to prepare Al Jaber to achieve a convincing result with the police.
A crucial double act and Saudi objections
Although Al Jaber got off to an uncertain start, his UN counterpart was always firmly in his sights. Simon Stiell, a former minister and chief negotiator for Grenada, is Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC and combines forensic expertise in its arcane procedures with a passionate commitment to climate justice and a lively articulation.
In Cops, the executive secretary and the president of the host country form a dual persona, with the latter listening to the often warring parties and the former leading the process and facilitating consensus.
“Still and Al Jaber were the perfect combination to get results in these negotiations,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser who now works at American University. “Stiell was seen as an extremely honest broker, particularly in the developing world, and Al Jaber was uniquely positioned to attract the support of other petrostates.”
For Cop28, the most important deal would be an obscure part of the Paris Agreement known as the global inventory. This process, required by Article 14 of the 2015 pact, requires a comprehensive assessment every five years of progress – or lack thereof – in reducing emissions in line with temperature targets.
It was this stocktaking that ultimately led to the breakthrough of Cop28 – the resolution to “move away” from fossil fuels, a phase-out in all but name, one diplomat said. But it was only thanks to Stiell that this was possible.
The states had submitted approximately 170,000 pages of concerns; Stiell summarized her distillation in three short reports. This is a reference to the need to phase out fossil fuels. Stiell had carefully prepared the ground.
When negotiations began in Dubai, a loose coalition of about 130 countries called for an exit. The EU and the USA, among others, wanted to include the “undiminished” criterion and thus open the way to CCS, a weaker formulation that angered some developing countries.
As the two-week negotiations drew to a close, the Presidency prepared its first draft text for the global stocktaking decision. It was bombed.
On the positive side, the text unabatedly deletes the term and keeps references to CCS far from the main objective of “reducing both consumption and production of fossil fuels”. But in the diplomatic jargon of the overarching binding instruction, the fossil fuel language was framed as just one of just a list of options that “required the parties to take measures that could include, among other things,” the main reservation.
“That one word 'could' just kills everything,” said Eamon Ryan, Ireland's environment minister. “It is nowhere near ambitious enough.” None of the countries supporting the phase-out could accept this.
One country could: Saudi Arabia. The Guardian has learned that its head of delegation appeared “happy” with the draft on this crucial point.
The presidential team then began an intensive round of shuttle diplomacy. It became clear that the draft needed to be significantly strengthened.
Finally, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, a new text was drafted that would delete the fatal “could” and replace it with a call for the world to “move away” from fossil fuels – still a weaker instruction than many would like, but better than what came before. The Saudis were in a bind: Public criticism of the police would raise tensions with the United Arab Emirates, their neighbor and long-time ally, and risk branding them as the ultimate climate villain on the world stage.
When asked about it, Kerry downplayed the US's role: “This morning I had a meeting with them, with His Royal Highness Prince Abdulaziz, but that might not have had any impact at all, they might have thought, 'Get rid of this pest here.' out.” “Who knows?”
Few can know for sure. But after that meeting and after Al Jaber withstood “immense pressure,” an insider said, 30 years of Saudi objections were lifted. The text could happen.
Mitzi Jonelle Tan from the Philippines hugs Adriana Calderon Hernandez (right) and Line Niedeggen (left) after protesting at Cop28. Photo: Peter Dejong/AP
At the end of the conference, Al Jaber returned to his home in Abu Dhabi. He returns to his job running an oil company that is planning the fifth largest increase in oil and gas production in the world.
To many, this smacks of hypocrisy. Of course Saudi Arabia agreed to the Cop28 deal, critics say – they want there to be no teeth left. Al Jaber was criticized on the eve of Cop28 for trying to use the negotiations to strike oil deals, an accusation he denied. Al Gore, a former US vice president and long-time climate advocate, said: “[Adnoc] are following the advice of their PR firms and waiting until the last police gavel to launch the massive expansion, one of the largest expansions of any fossil fuel company on the planet. [Adnoc] is one of the dirtiest companies, it is one of the least responsible companies…It is a ruse.”
The crucial question for the planet is what happens next. There is a sad story in UN climate negotiations where countries were dissatisfied with an outcome one year and tried to reverse it the next year. It's often about taking one step forward and then two steps back.
Next year promises to be a special challenge. The host is Azerbaijan, an oil state, 90% of whose export revenues and 60% of the state budget come from oil and gas. The UAE wanted a successful UN climate summit, a triumph on the world stage. What the Azerbaijani government expects from a Baku police officer could be completely different.
Whatever happens, countries cannot afford to wait for police to make enough progress to end the fossil fuel era. Not only our production, but also our consumption of coal, oil and gas must decrease. Unless governments, businesses and individuals decide to phase out fossil fuels, and it is timely, funded and justified to all, strong demand will keep the fossil fuel industry afloat. In the meantime, the clock keeps ticking and emissions continue to rise.
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