Oil CEO Sultan Al Jaber is good person to guide COP 28

ABU DHABI — If the world gets lucky, this may very well be the yr fossil fuel producers and climate activists bury their hatchets and join hands to scale back emissions and ensure our planet’s future.

If that sounds hopelessly Utopian, take that up with the leaders of this resource-rich, renewables-generating Middle Eastern monarchy. The United Arab Emirates is decided to inject specificity, urgency, and pragmatism right into a process that always has lacked all three: the twenty eighth convening of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, referred to as COP 28, which the UAE will host from November 30 to December 12. 

To kick off 2023, the oil and gas and climate communities gathered this weekend for the Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum, launching the annual Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week. After a long time of mutual mistrust, there’s a growing recognition they can not live without one another.

Thank Russian President Vladimir Putin’s criminal war in Ukraine, and his ongoing weaponization of energy, for injecting a recent dose of hard-headed reality into climate conversations. It’s seldom been so clear that energy security and cleaner energy are indivisible. The guideline is “the energy sustainability trilemma,” defined as the necessity to balance energy reliability, affordability, and sustainability.

What’s contributing to this recent pragmatism is a recognition by much of the climate community that the energy transition to renewables cannot be achieved without fossil fuels, in order that they should be made cleaner. They’ve come to accept that natural gas, particularly liquified natural gas (LNG), with half the emissions footprint of coal, provides a robust bridging fuel. 

Once derided by green activists, nuclear power can also be winning over recent fans—particularly in relation to the small, modular plants where there are fewer concerns over safety and weapons proliferation. 

For his or her part, just about all major oil and gas producers, who once viewed climate activists with disdain, now embrace the fact of climate science and are investing billions of dollars in renewables and efforts to make their fossil fuels cleaner.

“Every serious hydrocarbon producer knows the longer term, in a world of declining use of fossil fuels, is to be low price, low risk and low carbon,” said David Goldwyn, the previous State Department special envoy for energy. “The one solution to ensure we do that is to have industry on the table.”

Nowhere is that this shift amongst climate activists more evident than in Germany, where Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, the Green Party leader, is serving because the pragmatist-in-chief. 

Habeck, who serves as Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Motion, has been the driving force behind extending the lifetime of the country’s three nuclear plants through April and in launching Germany’s first LNG import terminal in December, with as many as five more to follow.

“I’m ultimately chargeable for the safety of the German energy system,” Habeck told Financial Times’ reporter Guy Chazan in a sweeping profile of the German politician. “So, the buck stops with me. … I became minister to make tough decisions, to not be Germany’s hottest politician.”

Some climate activists were aghast this Thursday when the UAE named Sultan Al Jaber, the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), as president of this yr’s COP 28. 

“This appointment goes beyond putting the fox accountable for the henhouse,” said Teresa Anderson of ActionAid, a development charity. “Like last yr’s summit, we’re increasingly seeing fossil fuel interests taking control of the method and shaping it to fulfill their very own needs.”

What that overlooks is that Al Jaber’s wealthy background in each renewables and fossil fuels make him a perfect selection at a time when efforts to deal with climate change have been far too slow, lacking the inclusivity to provide more transformative results.  

Al Jaber is CEO of the world’s 14th largest oil producer, but he at the identical time was the founding CEO of Masdar, certainly one of the world’s largest renewables investors, where he stays chairman. He also represents a rustic that despite its resource riches has develop into a serious nuclear power producer, was the primary Middle East country to hitch the Paris Climate Agreement and was the first Middle East country to set out a roadmap to net zero emissions by 2050.  

Over the past 15 years, the UAE has invested $40 billion in renewable energy and clean tech globally. In November it signed a partnership with america to take a position an extra $100 billion in clean energy. Some 70% of the UAE economy is generated outside the oil and gas sector, making it an exception amongst major producing countries in its diversification.

Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, has explained his country’s approach this fashion: “There shall be a time, 50 years from now, once we load the last barrel of oil aboard the ship. The query is… are we going to feel sad? If our investment today is true, I feel—dear brothers and sisters—we are going to have fun that moment.”

Al Jaber, talking to the Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum on Saturday, captured his ambition to drive faster and more transformative results at COP 28.

“We’re way off course,” said Al Jaber.

“The world is playing catchup in relation to the important thing Paris goal of holding global temperatures all the way down to 1.5 degrees,” he said. “And the hard reality is that in an effort to achieve this goal, global emissions must fall 43% by 2030. So as to add to that challenge, we must decrease emissions at a time of continued economic uncertainty, heightened geopolitical tensions and increasing pressure on energy.” 

He called for “transformational progress… through game-changing partnerships, solutions and outcomes.” He said the world must triple renewable energy generation from eight terawatt hours to 23, and greater than double low-carbon hydrogen production to 180 million tons for industrial sectors, which have the toughest carbon footprint to abate. 

“We will work with the energy industry on accelerating the decarbonization, reducing methane, and expanding hydrogen,” said Al Jaber. “Let’s keep our concentrate on holding back emissions, not progress.”

If that sounds Utopian, let’s have more of it.   

 — Frederick Kempe is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Atlantic Council.