Climate experts warn of fossil fuel tactics at COP28

Oil-rich Gulf states have positioned themselves as both champions of climate innovation and guardians of fossil fuel interests -- a balancing act experts warn could derail action at COP28 in Dubai.

This year's United Nations climate summit is being chaired and hosted by the United Arab Emirates, a Gulf country which is one of the biggest oil producers.

According to COP28 director general Majid Al Suwadi, "the UAE has been a leader when it comes to climate change".

"We have been doing our part," he said in September.

But one of the "inherent flaws of the COP system" is that national interests -- particularly the host's -- inevitably influence the outcome, said Ahmed El Droubi, international campaigns manager at Climate Action Network.

Indeed, the UAE has appointed Sultan Al Jaber, the head of state-owned oil company ADNOC, as COP president, drawing protests from environmentalists.

He sees this appointment as an opportunity for a better climate future. "We will bring a pragmatic, realistic and solutions-oriented approach that delivers transformative progress for climate and low carbon economic growth," Al Jaber said in a statement earlier this year.

At COP27 in Egypt, where oil and gas lobbyists outnumbered most delegations, the final text included a last-minute provision to boost "low-emission energy".

That term includes natural gas, into which Egypt has invested billions of dollars in recent years.

In Dubai, activists expect the fight will be even harder, with the hydrocarbons industry intent on "not just delaying, denying, diverting meaningful climate action, but also greenwashing their polluting work", Farhana Sultana, professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University, told AFP.

With time running out, the stakes are higher than ever at COP28.

To keep global warming at an average of 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures, greenhouse gas emissions must drop 43 p ercent by 2030 from 2019 levels, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN's climate body.

"At the moment, we're not cutting anything, and the situation gets more urgent every year," Karim Elgendy, associate fellow at Chatham House, told AFP.

Running out of time

Instead of cutting fossil fuels outright, oil giants have touted several once-marginal technologies as promising solutions to cut emissions.

They include carbon capture and storage (CCS), direct air capture and carbon credit trading -- all carbon management mechanisms that amount to "false climate solutions", according to Sultana.

CCS prevents CO2 from entering the atmosphere by siphoning exhaust from power plants, while direct air capture pulls CO2 from thin air.

Both technologies have been demonstrated to work, but remain far from maturity and commercial scalability.

Carbon credit trading schemes -- which underpin much of the world's "net zero" ambitions -- have long been dogged by charges of deception, poor transparency, dodgy accounting practices and in-built conflicts of interest.

According to Elgendy, these solutions "need several years to be viable, and we simply don't have that time".

In September, UN chief Antonio Guterres warned: "We must make up time lost to foot-dragging, arm-twisting and the naked greed of entrenched interests raking in billions from fossil fuels."