As president-designate of the next U.N. climate summit in late November, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber is defensive about his role and host nation.
Despite the protests of climate activists, Al Jaber doesn't see his role overseeing one of the world's largest oil companies – in a nation that's the world's seventh largest oil producer – as a conflict of interest when he presides over the nearly two-week long summit known as COP28.
The chief executive of the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company says both he and the host nation, the United Arab Emirates, are dedicated to the 2015 Paris Agreement's most ambitious goal of holding warming to no more than a 1.5° Celsius increase above pre-industrial levels.
“The UAE assumes the responsibility of hosting COP28 with humility and a deep sense of urgency to deliver a future-proofed world for us all," Al Jaber told a gathering 6,300 government officials, industry leaders, futurists, academics, and senior delegates for the inaugural Climate Future Week at Dubai on Saturday.
"As hosts of COP28, we are guided by a single North Star, keeping 1.5° within reach," he said. "We aim to do that with a four-part action agenda: fast-tracking a just and orderly energy transition, fixing climate finance, focusing on people, lives and livelihoods, and underpinning everything with full inclusivity."
The talks are conducted under the authority of the Bonn-based U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, which serves as a platform for the summits, or Conference of Parties, known as COPs.
The purpose of COP28 is to fulfill nations' obligations under the Paris treaty to hold the world to an upper limit of 2° average temperature rise, and, preferably, no more than a 1.5° increase.
That will require significant rounds of carbon emissions cuts globally, yet the company that Al Jaber oversees wants to increase its production of 4 million barrels of crude oil a day up to 5 million a day.
He also is UAE's minister of industry and advanced technology and heads the renewable energy company Masdar in Abu Dhabi, but argues the world risks dysfunction if its transition away from the use of all fossil fuels is too abrupt.
By contrast, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has pointedly described oil and gas companies as potential "planet wreckers" for raking in trillions of dollars in profits and spending too little on clean energy and carbon capture technologies.
"Let's face facts. The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions. It's fossil fuels – period," Guterres said in June at a round of climate talks to prepare for Dubai.
"Fossil fuel industry transition plans must be transformation plans, that chart a company's move to clean energy – and away from a product incompatible with human survival," he said. "Otherwise, they are just proposals to become more efficient planet wreckers."
