It’s Week 2 of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, and the oil and gas lobby is hitting the panic button.
For months leading into this round of annual negotiations, calls for a phaseout of all fossil fuels have been sounding through the endless marathon of official meetings, reports, analyses, and advocacy that precede any COP. Through much of that time, Sultan Al Jaber, the oil and gas CEO controversially appointed by the United Arab Emirates to lead this year’s make-or-break climate talks, has fought hard to sustain one of the industry’s favourite talking points: that there’s any realistic way to phase down greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels without phasing down production, in time to get the climate emergency under control.
But it isn’t working. Not yet. And, quite possibly, not for much longer.
At last count, more than 100 of the 195 countries attending the conference, including the 27-member European Union and the 39-member Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), had signed on to the call for a fossil fuel phaseout. And remarkably, as of early Sunday morning in the Dubai time zone, that language had not yet been removed from the draft text of the final COP28 declaration.
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