STAKEHOLDERS WORRIED MIDDLE EAST TENSIONS WILL REMOVE CLIMATE ACTION URGENCY, By Saman Rizwan
STAKEHOLDERS WORRIED MIDDLE EAST TENSIONS WILL REMOVE CLIMATE ACTION URGENCY
Stakeholders Worried Middle East Tensions Will Remove Climate Action Urgency
By Saman Rizwan
November 06, 2023
As war rages in Gaza and the Biden administration ramps up its support for Israel, climate change policy-makers and activists are worried about the new conflict's impact on the climate agenda as well as the urgency they say is lacking in tackling the issue.
The October 7th Hamas attacks and the ensuing Israeli counteroffensive come at a particularly troublesome time for U.S. lawmakers concerned about the upcoming COP28 climate conference to be held in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in late November.
The issue of leadership of the COP28 conference, currently to be led by Sultan Al-Jaber, whom Politico calls a powerful energy executive from the UAE, continues to trouble Democratic circles on Capitol Hill.
Al-Jaber is the CEO of the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), a company that announced plans to add 7.6 billion barrels of oil to its production in the coming years, representing the fifth largest increase in the world. ADNOC has also invested in Lukoil, a sanctioned Russian company.
Members of Congress concerned about preventing delays in implementing the climate agenda have been involved behind the scenes, pressuring the Biden administration to show more leadership and force a change in the direction of the upcoming climate talks.
We, the undersigned Members of the United States Congress and Members of the European Parliament, write to urge you to address our profound concern that current rules governing the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) permit private sector polluters to exert undue influence on UNFCCC processes. We address this letter to the executive leaders from the jurisdictions in which our respective bodies function and to UNFCCC leadership, who can work collectively to enact the requested reforms, wrote multiple House members well known for their views on climate change in a letter to world leaders this past May.
We urge you to advocate for the United Arab Emirates to withdraw the appointment of Sultan Al-Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, as President-designate of COP28. The decision to name as president of COP28 the chief executive of one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies—a company that has recently announced plans to add 7.6 billion barrels of oil to its production in the coming years, representing the fifth largest increase in the world— risks undermining the negotiations. With common sense reforms to help restore public faith in the COP process severely jeopardized by having an oil company executive at the helm, we respectfully submit that different leadership is necessary to help ensure that COP28 is a serious and productive climate summit, the U.S. lawmakers continued.
The letter to President Biden, Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission and others was penned after John Kerry, Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, held a quiet dinner at a Georgetown restaurant in January attended by Al-Jaber, along with U.S. business leaders, lobbyists and other stakeholders in the upcoming climate talks, where special envoy Kerry attempted to form a consensus on how to move forward.
The gathering, first reported by Politico’s E&E News, underscores the Biden administration’s recognition of the clear political challenges it will confront at the climate summit next month. Al-Jaber has already faced significant criticism for reaping fossil fuel profits and scheduled to lead talks on the urgency of cutting greenhouse gas pollution. Kerry, who has defended Al-Jaber as a “terrific choice” to preside over the summit, used the Washington dinner earlier this year to introduce the Emirati oil chief to people with influential roles in the U.S. climate debate, wrote Politico.
In fact, Kerry's hosting of the dinner was an acknowledgement of the resistance in Congress and elsewhere to the current structure of the COP28 leadership.
Another letter by a similar group of Members of Congress to special envoy Kerry indicated how resistant they are to the U.S. administration’s support of Al-Jabar.
We are writing to urge you to push the United Arab Emirates to withdraw the appointment of Sultan Al-Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, as President-designate of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties 28 (COP 28). The decision to name the chief executive of one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies as president of the next U.N. Climate Change Conference risks jeopardizing climate progress from successive U.N. Climate Conferences. To help ensure that COP 28 is a serious and productive climate summit, we believe the United States should urge the United Arab Emirates to name a different lead for COP 28 or, at a minimum, seek assurances that it will promote an ambitious COP 28 aligned with the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) findings and take concrete steps to demonstrate domestic and regional leadership toward this end, said the congressional letter.
Further, a climate caucus in the U.S. Congress intends to force a change at the top of COP28 to someone other than Al-Jaber who is not involved in the oil and gas sector. Smart policy in times of crisis is essential in the caucus’s view, and not political.
The question is whether or not the Biden administration is listening to their concerns.
Saman Rizwan is an analyst and frequently writes on politics, the environment and gender. She has a Masters in International Relations from S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, NTU, Singapore. As a journalist, Ms. Rizwan has written about international politics, technology, human rights and gender-based violence, and she has published in first tier media outlets including Forbes, Newsweek, The Nation, South China Morning Post and The Diplomat. Ms. Rizwan has reported from the UK, South East Asia and Saudi Arabia. She is a former researcher at the Centre for Strategic and Contemporary Research, and lives and works in the UK.