How Does a Fossil Fuel CEO Deliver a Win at COP28?

For one brief, surreal moment, it almost looked like Sultan Al Jaber could get a deal done. But the voluntary pledges fell far short, and then the COP28 President himself burst the bubble.

Dec 03, 2023

It was a surreal yet weirdly compelling, almost convincing moment: 50 mammoth fossil fuel businesses pledging to essentially phase out methane emissions and end routine gas flaring by 2030.

For half an hour on a livestream from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, you could almost believe: that COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), was serious about bringing his peers to the table and had the clout to get the deal done.

The Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter immediately ran into scorching criticism from a list of 320 civil society organizations, led by Oil Change International. The groups pointed out that a “robust negotiated energy package” by the end of this year’s COP28 negotiations in the United Arab Emirates would have to include “an unambiguous agreement to end all new oil and gas expansion” and a “clear call to equitably and rapidly phase out all fossil fuels,” along with a renewable energy and energy efficiency pledge that was announced in tandem with the oil and gas charter.

But you wouldn’t have known it from the tone in the media conference room in Dubai.

“What we’ve done already is shown that we deliver action,” when “nobody expected that we’d be able to do that,” an exuberant COP28 Director General, Majid Al Suwaidi, said Saturday. A 1.5°C threshold for average global warming “has been our north star from the very beginning,” he added, “and we’ve taken that in a very systematic way.”

The day’s decarbonization promises, coupled with the methane pledge from China and the United States leading up to the COP, could make Saturday, December 2 “the most impactful day of announcements” in nearly 30 years of COP negotiations, said Fred Krupp, president of the U.S. Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). “This new initiative, if, if, the commitments are met, has the potential to reduce methane emissions by each of the companies signing up by an average of 80-90%.”

Until it turned out that Al Jaber himself had burst that bubble two weeks before.

‘Tell Us How You Really Feel’

The news landed with a thud earlier this morning, the second time in less than a week that the COP28 secretariat’s own actions or statements undercut its top-line messaging.

Last week, the UK-based Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR) and the British Broadcasting Corporation reported on more than 150 pages of briefing notes, produced by COP28 staff, that targeted nearly 30 countries for possible oil and gas trade deals during Al Jaber’s bilateral diplomatic discussions in the lead-up to the COP.

Then today, the two news agencies revealed Al Jaber’s curious view that there’s “no science” to support a fossil fuel phaseout as an essential part of the fight to hold average global warming to 1.5°C.

During a live event November 21, Mary Robinson, chair of the Elders and a former UN special envoy for climate change, had asked Al Jaber whether he was in a unique position to deliver on an ambitious fossil phaseout agenda during COP28 negotiations this week and next.

“We’re in an absolute crisis that is hurting women and children more than anyone,” she said, “and it’s because we have not yet committed to phasing out fossil fuel. That is the one decision that COP28 can take and in many ways, because you’re head of ADNOC, you could actually take it with more credibility.”

“I accepted to come to this meeting to have a sober and mature conversation,” Al Jaber replied, in what the Guardian called an “ill-tempered” response. “I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5°C.”

The COP 28 President added: “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phaseout of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socio-economic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”

Science to the Rescue

Shocked climate scientists were only too happy to oblige.

“The COP President believes there is no science showing that fossil fuels must be phased out to meet 1.5°C. I strongly recommend him asking around for the latest IPCC report,” snarked Grantham Institute Director of Research Joeri Rogelj. “That report, approved unanimously by 195 countries including the UAE, shows a variety of ways to limit warming to 1.5°C—all of which indicate a de facto phaseout of fossil fuels in the first half of the century.”

No less than 115 modelled scenarios showing humanity’s best path back to a 1.5°C future all depend on a fossil fuel phaseout, added planetary boundaries specialist Johan Röckstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, during a news conference earlier today. “The only way to do that is to phase out fossil fuels by 2050,” he said. “That is in all the scenarios.”

And as for the fossil industry claim that they’re just altruistically trying to bring the gift of energy to the parts of the world that have none—Swazi public interest attorney and Oil Change senior advisor, Thuli Makama, had that argument covered.

“Fossil fuels do not equal development. Fossil fuels do not equal energy access. They do not equal jobs or profit to support our economy,” she declared. “Fossil fuels threaten our livelihoods, health, and biodiversity. An equitable, managed phaseout of fossil fuel production provides a much brighter pathway for Africa’s development.”

What Would It Take?

By the time today’s news broke, an unlikely but fascinating subtext had already been taking shape: the idea that it might just take an oil and gas CEO to deliver the ambitious, real-world results that would make a fly-in conference of 100,000 people worth holding in the midst of a global climate emergency.

It’s certainly not the likeliest, best, or even mildly intuitive path to get the progress and momentum we need from this COP.

But the question is out there, and it’s worth thinking through what it would take to make a demonstrably weird theory work out in practice. If you set aside the desperate inevitability in accepting that if we’re stuck with a fossil-fuelled COP Presidency, we might as well make the best of it, it’s interesting to turn that hopelessness on its head and set expectations for how COP28 could deliver, given the givens.

If it were possible for a fossil industry executive from one of the world’s most entrenched and repressive petro-states to set all of that aside and get the COP Presidency right, what would that look like?
And what results would we need to see over the next 10 days to believe that Sultan Al Jaber really meant it, that he had set out to make a difference in the real world, where the timelines are unforgiving and the results matter, not just in the spin cycles generated by his expert PR team?

The answers to those questions are more climate science than rocket science, and the COP is already delivering on the easier parts.

An historic though still desperately underfunded deal on the overwhelming loss and damage hitting the world’s most vulnerable countries was seen as a basic price of entry for this year’s negotiations, and COP28 got it done on the first day.

The renewables and energy efficiency deal was announced yesterday, with 118 countries signing on. If it makes it into the final conference declaration, it’ll unlock some of the fossil fuel reductions we need.

But after those relatively simple, straightforward wins, things get tougher.

Making a CEO’s Influence Count

As Rogelj, Röckstrom, and legions of others are pointing out, Al Jaber can’t do his job properly without guiding these negotiations toward consensus on a fossil fuel phaseout—not all of it tomorrow, not right away, but in time to avert climate collapse that will make today’s already devastating impacts look like a picnic. As climate scientists, climate hawks, and the International Energy Agency have pointed out countless times, it begins by calling a halt to any new oil, gas, or coal exploration or development.

By recognizing that we won’t need those resources, and the atmosphere and our future can’t afford them.

Al Jaber would get the ball rolling for the transparent climate accounting and tougher national targets that UN climate secretary Simon Stiell called for in his opening remarks Thursday.

He would push hard for real, sufficient climate finance on all the various streams of COP negotiations—emission reductions, climate adaptation, loss and damage, financing for vulnerable developing regions like Africa, and more—to deliver results where they’re needed and build trust (or even the slightest suspicion) that rich countries are prepared to contribute their fair share.

He would ground the discussion in the avalanche of dire reports we’ve seen in the lead-up to the COP—showing fossil extraction far out of sync with the 1.5°C target, emissions still running wild, catastrophic threats to human health, and searing climate inequalities between rich and poor countries.

And he would use his storied industry clout and access to bring those cascading urgencies to his fossil industry peers and international finance contacts to make this COP the transformative moment he’s been promising.

That COP presidents always promise, and haven’t delivered yet.

At the COP Presidency’s victory lap news conference Saturday, the EDF’s Fred Krupp laid out a vision of what a win could look like. As The Energy Mix reported:

Krupp recalled a moment at a private meeting in Abu Dhabi where Al Jaber… convened his industry peers in late September.
Looking ahead to the COP, “he said this could be the companies’ last chance to demonstrate that they could step up and do what needed to be done, to at least take a big step,” Krupp recounted. “He talked about methane as an element of these reductions,” and “at the end of this talk he said, ‘I need you. I need your support. I need you to sign up. Are you with me? Are you in or are you out?”
The room was “entirely silent,” Krupp said. “The hair was standing up on the back of my neck.” Then at the end of the day, after several hours of side meetings, Krupp said he had a chance to ask Al Jaber how the industry executives had responded. “He picked up his phone and he pointed it at me and he said, ‘Fred, my phone has been lighting up all day. They’re telling me they are in.”

It was a beautiful story. If you’d been in the room (or on the livestream), you would have wanted to believe. But the commitments were voluntary, the “big step” fell short of what the moment demands, and we now know a big part of the reason—it was coming from a COP28 President who chooses not to believe the basic science of keeping 1.5°C alive.

But for the next 10 days, and for the year ahead, Sultan Al Jaber has a job to do. (No, not the ADNOC one.) Is it asking a lot? Absolutely. More than he or any other fossil CEO can actually deliver? Probably. But he’s the one who wanted the assignment. And now that the rest of us are being asked to take a leap of faith while the planet bakes, it’s only fair to expect him to leap first.

Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix, The Energy Mix Weekender, and our newest weekly e-digest, Cities & Communities.

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