Why on earth is a giant petrostate hosting Cop28?

Two glaring contradictions leap out when you consider why on earth the United Arab Emirates is hosting this year’s international climate conference.

The first is why a giant petrostate accused of greenwashing has been put in charge of Cop28.

The global mission to avert climate catastrophe is being chaired by Sultan Al Jaber, who is head of the UAE national oil company, ADNOC (Abu Dhabi National Oil Company), which is about to increase production from four million to five million barrels a day by 2027.

Doesn’t inspire you with an awful lot of confidence, does it? A bit like putting a major tobacco manufacturer in charge of an anti-smoking conference.

The other strange paradox is how the Cop28 organisers have seen fit to issue a statement saying that protests by climate activists would be allowed at the event.

Think more of a group of demonstrators herded into a pen rather than tens of thousands marching through downtown Dubai, as happened in Glasgow two years ago at Cop26.

That’s because protests – or rather gatherings of at least five people in a public place – are against UAE law, punishable by between one and three years in prison.

Imagine Bangladeshi delegates being marched off by police for complaining that 18 million of their fellow citizens will be displaced within the next 40 years due to rising sea levels.

With the annual climate crisis conference being a UN event, the Emiratis can hardly enforce a ban, and even they realise that carting off inhabitants of the Pacific nation Kiribati for complaining that yet more of their islands had gone underwater would not be a good look.

But it’s the mere fact that the tiny Gulf state has to make an announcement that protests will be allowed – for the duration of the event and during the hours that conference is sitting – that’s so incongruous.

Last year Cop27 was held in Egypt, where a ban on public protest has existed for almost a decade, ever since the country’s first democratically elected president was overthrown in an army coup.

A bit like the UAE, Egypt announced in advance that protests would be allowed before then corralling demonstrators into a small purpose-built area off a busy road, away from the conference centre.

It is grotesque that public discussion of an issue which attracts more protest than any other – and quite rightly so given how high the stakes are – should be held in countries where demonstrations are banned.

More than 50 prisoners are still behind bars a decade after a 2013 trial – dubbed the UAE-94 case – held at the peak of Arab Spring uprisings.

This saw 94 lawyers, professors, activists and students who had politely petitioned the government to institute democratic reforms subsequently tried for plotting to overthrow it and labelled “terrorists”. One man, Abdullah al-Helou, finished his sentence in 2017 but is still behind bars.

The human rights defender, Ahmed Mansoor, is serving a 10-year sentence for “insulting the status and prestige of the UAE and its symbols including its leaders.”

A Human Rights Watch report in 2021 reported: “He sleeps on the floor, denied a mattress or pillow, between four walls of a tiny solitary cell in a desert prison in the United Arab Emirates, a country which zealously strives to portray itself as tolerant and rights-respecting”.

So, I think it can be said, the UAE authorities don’t take kindly to people who demonstrate.

Many would argue that in order to tackle the climate crisis challenge you’ve got to have the big polluters on board. But does that mean that a country promising net zero emissions by 2050 while currently producing five million barrels of oil a day should be given hosting duties?

Like Rishi Sunak when he announced new oil and gas licences for the North Sea, the UAE’s pledges on emissions come with promises of carbon capture projects using technology which hasn’t been tested yet and which, while welcome, if it did work would only offset a tiny fraction of the damage being done.

Yes, huge petrostates are promising to invest in renewables to such a level they would eventually be the world’s biggest providers of green energy. But this transition – paid for by the huge profits they will make from the oil and gas industry – will take decades to come.

Unfortunately, we just don’t have that much time. According to a UN report last year, countries’ current policies would lead to an 11 per cent increase in emissions by 2030 from 2010 levels, but a reduction of 43 per cent from 2019 levels by 2030 is what’s needed if the target of limiting temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is to be met.

That will not happen if Cop28 turns into an expo for the fossil fuel industry.

Al Jaber’s bid to simultaneously ride two horses and take us to some kind of environmental nirvana has won some support, including from the US climate envoy, John Kerry.

As well as heading ADNOC, and being UAE’s minister of industry and advanced technology, Al Jaber is also chair of Masdar, a renewable energy firm operating in over 40 countries.

It has invested in mainly solar and wind projects with a capacity of displacing more than 19 million tonnes of cardon dioxide emissions annually, which it hopes to increase to seven times that by 2030.

But the main criticism of Al Jaber – who also doubled as his country’s envoy to Cop27 – is that he fails to address the need to phase out the use of fossil fuels, instead focusing on reducing fossil fuel emissions.

His own country is still unclear how it will meet its net zero targets by 2050, considering it has crude oil reserves of 111 billion barrels.

Al Jaber is welcoming to a global alliance of fossil fuel companies believing they can use carbon capture technology to offset the damage they are continuing to do to the planet.

Expect to hear a lot more about this at Cop28, with critics saying the technology for green hydrogen and carbon capture has not been tested on the scale needed.

Alok Sharma, who hosted Cop26 in Glasgow, has said we’ll be doing well if Dubai produces “a timeline on consigning fossil fuels to history”.

The question is really whether the Emiratis can be trusted. The respected campaigner, Nicholas McGeehan, of FairSquare, believes they cannot.

“The UAE cannot be taken at its word,” he said. “Human rights activists have known this for a very long time, and it is critical that climate activists recognise the UAE’s duplicity.”