Why is the oil industry allowed to dominate Cop28?

By Claudia Webbe MP 

Cop28 must tear out ‘the poisoned root’ of the fossil fuel industry if it is to contribute to saving the planet, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE MP, as she bears witness to the execrable charade in the UAE

AS I write this article, I am in Dubai, as one of the British Parliament’s non-voting delegates to the Cop28 UN climate change summit.

Cop28 has been called a “new Davos” where political deals to address climate change are “overshadowed by the business deals being made,” and as an event “led by bankers and lobbyists.”

In the week leading up to Cop28, the headlines were filled with accusations that the UAE was using its role as host “as an opportunity to strike oil and gas deals” — a manoeuvre that UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres condemned as a “serious breach” of standards.

This reality sums up one of the most fundamental issues with Cop28 and every Cop event that has taken place since it was inaugurated in 1995 — since the very beginning, Cop has been shaped by corporate interests and particularly by the very fossil fuel industry that sits at the heart of the climate crisis.

This year’s event, which is taking place in one of the world’s biggest oil-producing countries, is not only full of oil executives, it is run by one Dr Sultan al-Jaber the chief executive of Adnoc, the UAE’s national oil company.

Dr Jaber has not been reticent about his continuing enthusiasm for his industry. Early in the event — while the BBC reports that governments and fossil fuel companies are “going big” on ending the use of fossil fuels — reportedly, he had said publicly that there is “no science” underpinning the demands of climate activists for the phasing out of fossil fuels.

This conflict is woven through the very fabric of the event. Only last month, Guterres called fossil fuels the “poisoned root of the climate crisis” that is “racing our planet down a dead-end 3°Celsius temperature rise” and must be “torn out” to have any chance of keeping global warming to 1.5°C or less.

Although 3°C may not sound like a huge rise to the uninitiated, for context the difference between the modern era and the last ice age that put Britain under hundreds of metres of ice is 5°C. A 3°C rise in a few decades will be a societal and humanitarian disaster.

The governments of low-lying island nations such as Kiribati are already attempting to arrange for their people to “migrate with dignity” as their homes disappear beneath rising seas. Parliamentarians from Africa and other developing nations, attending Cop28 have signed a document, at the conclusion of their climate parliament, recognising a major “emissions and implementation gap” and committing to push their governments harder, but they are a small minority of those present.

Logically, oil and gas companies should be making decisions that will rescue the 1.5°C target, because the societal and geographical chaos that will result from not doing so will make their profits meaningless.

But in reality, they do not do so. Oil companies and intermediaries appear to be flying in, using Cop to make deals behind the scenes, while publicly on the international stage, pledges are made that are inadequate to begin with and then abandoned or ignored almost as quickly as they were made.

And again, the Cop28 host illustrates a microcosm of this conflict and deficiency. In 2006, the Masdar City initiative was launched as part of Abu Dhabi’s “Vision 2030,” out of a subtle admission by the Emirates that their current oil-based economy was unsustainable.

Today, 17 years later, only two square kilometres of the planned six have been built and its planned population of 50,000 is — at most — 6,000. The initial promises that it would be a zero carbon, zero waste city have been abandoned and replaced by “low carbon” and “low waste” aspirations.

In the same way, it can be argued that the pledges and plans of successive Cop events have never been implemented, with promised reductions in greenhouse emissions instead becoming rises.

So relentless has this failure been that in May the World Meteorological Organisation reported that there is a 66 per cent likelihood of exceeding the 1.5°C threshold in at least one year between now and 2027.

July this year was, globally, the hottest month ever recorded, leading Guterres to state that “the era of global warming has ended, and the era of global boiling has arrived … climate change is here; it is terrifying, and it is just the beginning. It is still possible to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C … but only with dramatic, immediate climate action.”

September this year was then an astonishing 0.5°C hotter than the previous record for the month. Last weekend leading climate scientist Zeke Hausfather confirmed that last month was also the hottest November on record “by a wide margin” and was 1.6°C above pre-industrial levels. Hausfather has described the latest climate statistics as “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”

But instead of following the UN secretary-general’s call to rip out the “poisoned root” of fossil fuel interests, it can be argued, that the UN’s Cop28 is built around their interests with no sign that that this will change in future.

Speaking from the Cop28 platform on Monday, the president of the Environmental Defence Fund, an industry-linked body that has supported gas extraction even by fracking, lauded a charter to “decarbonise” the oil industry as “the single most impactful day of announcements from any Cop” in fighting global warming. The official Cop28 X account responded to this claim of a “clean” fossil fuel industry with: “We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.”

Individual national governments are no better, particularly that of Britain. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak continues to claim that Britain is a world leader in the fight against climate change, but has blatantly watered down British climate policies, delayed the ban on new fossil fuel vehicles by five years and granted a slew of new licences in British waters.

Nor will a change of government make a meaningful change to Britain’s climate vandalism. Opposition leader Keir Starmer has told Cop28 that Britain will “lead from the front” and “by example” on climate change, claiming that Britain will have 100 per cent “clean power” by 2030.

Yet while Starmer says he will not grant new exploration licences for the North Sea, he has also said that existing licences will continue. Experts estimate that undiscovered British oil reserves amount to around a billion barrels, with the vast majority in areas already licensed — and say that Starmer’s latest stance is actually a softening of Labour’s previous position on oil and gas extraction.

Governments and corporations have ample opportunity at Cop28 to make new oil and gas deals, but the space made for the actual climate movement is severely limited: for example, the Indigenous Peoples Pavilion where delegates can listen to those directly affected by the climate catastrophe and who are campaigning on such issues as the Landback Movement, for the return of land taken from them.

This small presence, among others, is one of the few reminders that the poor, particularly in developing nations, who contribute almost nothing to climate change are the primary victims of it. Their needs should be front and centre of all discussions at every Cop, but they are not.

Last year’s Cop27 in Egypt agreed — despite much resistance — the principle of a “loss and damage” fund that would be available to poor nations to fight climate change and mitigate its effects on their people and environment.

Nothing was agreed, however, about how big the fund should be or who would actually fund it. That is supposed to be decided at Cop28 and campaigners have called for a fund of at least $25 billion, to be paid for by a levy on the oil industry. The media headlines reported that even far-right Italian premier Georgia Meloni had pledged €100 million, but it is a small drop in a very large bucket.

A recent Climate Policy Initiative report calculated that African nations — not the whole developing world — needed at least $2.8 trillion over the next six years just to meet the continent’s commitments on emissions, let alone improve the situation faced by their peoples and ecosystems.

The prospects of Cop28 securing even the woefully inadequate sum of $25 billion from the embedded fossil fuel interests and lobbyists look slim. The prospects of reaching an agreement to keep fossil fuels in the ground look even slimmer.

If Cop28 and its successors are to make a meaningful impact on the global climate emergency, the excision of fossil fuel advocates from the whole event — and from much more than the event — is essential. Only if the oil and gas industry lobby is removed from influence over the decisions made to fight climate change will they be significant, let alone actual change implemented.

And only then will adequate reparations and debt cancellations, paid for by the global North and their corporations, that a just transition to a low-carbon global economy without perpetuating poverty, be possible.

If Cop29 and onwards are to contribute to saving the planet from climate disaster, Guterres’s call to “tear out” the “poisoned root” of fossil fuels from our global economy and political system must be enacted without delay — and not just from an annual summit.

Claudia Webbe MP is the member of Parliament for Leicester East. You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and twitter.com/ClaudiaWebbe