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This year's United Nations climate summit in Dubai marks another opportunity for world leaders to do more to slow global warming, replace fossil fuels with renewable energy and be held accountable for their emissions-cutting pledges.
But how effective can we expect these negotiations to be when they're presided over by an oil executive?
The president of this fall's COP 28 summit, being hosted by the United Arab Emirates, will be Sultan Al Jaber, who runs the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Co.
The naming of Al Jaber to this position is so obvious a contradiction that climate activists and politicians have likened it to letting arms dealers lead peace talks or putting a tobacco CEO in charge of health policy. Public pressure for his ouster increased last week when more than 130 U.S. and European lawmakers called for Al Jaber to be removed, writing in a joint letter of their "profound concern" that the U.N. is permitting "private sector polluters to exert undue influence."
Putting an oil executive in charge is not only a bad look, it stands to undermine important and urgent negotiations and further erode public confidence in summits that have been criticized as little more than high-level venues for greenwashing.
But at the same time, the decision to pick Al Jaber to lead the summit only clarifies for the public how much power oil and gas interests already wield in this process. The fossil fuel industry is one of the largest delegations at the summits, sending more than 600 of its lobbyists to last year's COP 27 summit in Egypt, up from about 500 the year before in Scotland.
COP 28 organizers pointed to Al Jaber's experience as an engineer, a global energy industry leader and his other position as chair of Masdar, another state-owned company that develops solar and wind farms and other renewable energy projects. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry has defended Al Jaber as a "terrific choice" precisely because of his position as the head of an oil company who understands the need to transition to renewables.
Oil and gas interests have spent decades attacking the science and solutions to climate change using disinformation, delay and an arsenal of other tactics to prolong their profits. And they are increasingly pushing a scenario in which they don't have to stop pumping oil and gas, but will instead sell the world on largely unproven carbon-capture and storage technology and other dubious ways to suck up or offset the greenhouse gas emissions produced.
In that vein, Al Jaber said in a speech earlier this month that countries should be "laser-focused on phasing out fossil fuel emissions, while phasing up viable, affordable, zero-carbon alternatives." Experts interpreted those remarks, because they address "emissions" rather than production, as a pitch for continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels combined with carbon-capture and storage projects.
But it's a good bet that these talks would be different if they were held in the front-line communities most harmed by the climate crisis. If they hosted the negotiations and their representatives outnumbered oil and gas lobbyists, summit leaders would be talking less about whether fossil fuels need to go and more about how to replace them as quickly and equitably as possible.
* Guest editorial excerpt by The Los Angeles Times