COP28 president draws fierce backlash with attack on climate science

At this year’s United Nations climate conference (COP28), the summit’s president Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber — who also leads the United Arab Emirates’s national oil company — sparked controversy over the weekend by attacking the science on climate change.

“There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C,” al-Jaber said Sunday, referring to the temperature line scientists have agreed is the limit for safe levels of planetary heating.

The comments drew forceful criticism from across the climate movement, prompting al-Jaber to walk them back Monday.

“I respect the science in everything I do,” he said. “I have said over and over that the phase-down and the phaseout of fossil fuels is inevitable.”

But al-Jaber’s defense of fossil fuels as a safe long-term energy source stands in sharp contrast to the global scientific consensus backing a shift towards renewable energies — which are increasingly outcompeting fossil fuel sources on price, as well as in terms of the safety of the climate.

He was not alone in making the argument for continuing to use fossil fuels: He was joined over the weekend by Exxon CEO Darren Woods, who told Reuters on Sunday that no solution, including renewables, was “at the scale to solve the problem.”

The two fossil fuel executives both contended that renewable energy sources aren’t ready to bear the brunt of a global energy system historically reliant on fossil fuels — and that therefore world governments have little choice but to make those sources less damaging to the climate.

That is an idea that the International Energy Agency (IEA) — a leading global energy watchdog initially set up to maintain the consistent supply of oil — forcefully pushed back on in November.

The focus of the argument was carbon capture and storage — a technology which retrieves planet-heating gases from power plants and industrial processes.

While carbon capture technology is unproven at scale, an IEA report on the role of the fossil fuel industry in the transition to renewables found that it plays an important role in slowing the rate of planetary heating — particularly for processes like manufacturing cement, which chemically releases carbon dioxide even when produced without fossil fuels. 

But to argue that it will allow the fossil fuel industry to continue “with business-as-usual … is a fantasy,” IEA head Fatih Birol wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Putting carbon capture technology on every power plant and storing the result, Birol noted, is a gargantuan undertaking, “requiring a huge leap in annual investment from $4 billion last year to $3.5 trillion” — a difference of nearly one thousand times.

The fossil fuel industry, Birol said, “needs to commit to genuinely helping the world meet its energy needs and climate goals – which means letting go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution.”

Woods’s and al-Jaber’s comments at the conference — and in the lead-up to it — signal that is not a transformation they’re prepared to make.

In al-Jaber’s controversial remarks over the weekend, he was responding to former Irish President Mary Robinson in a debate hosted by The Guardian. Robinson had asked him why he would not commit to phase out fossil fuels — rather than simply commit to addressing pollution from their use.

“That is the one decision that COP28 can take, and in many ways, because you’re head of [the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC)], you could actually take it with more credibility,” Robinson said.

“We have to phase out fossil fuel, with just transition for the workers and their communities, and just transition into renewable, accessible, affordable clean energy,” al-Jaber responded.

He argued that Ireland could “lead, like developed countries always do, by example,” but charged that there was no science behind Robinson’s position.

“I have come to this, to this meeting, to have a sober and a mature conversation. We do not — I’m not in any way standing up to any discussion that is alarmist.”

A phase-down and phaseout of fossil fuels are “inevitable,” al-Jaber said, but “we need to be really serious and pragmatic about it.” 

He argued that allegations that ADNOC is investing in increased fossil fuel development were “biased and wrong.”

“You guys write a lie and you believe it,” al-Jaber said. “Show me a roadmap of a phaseout that allows for sustainable socioeconomic development — unless you want to take the world back into caves.”

“Give me the solution,” he added.

“The world will continue to need energy sources. We are the only ones in the world today that [have been] decarbonizing the oil and gas resources. We have the lowest carbon intensity,” al-Jaber continued, meaning that the United Arab Emirates is burning less oil and gas in the process of producing the fossil fuels it sends out to be burned.

“I have not heard you talk to the Norwegians like this,” he added.

Woods, meanwhile, told the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in mid-November that “the problem is not oil and gas. It’s emissions,” and he urged policymakers to “keep all viable solutions in play — even if they don’t align with your beliefs or ideology.”

But regardless of ideology, the economics are increasingly moving away from fossil fuels, experts told The Hill. While the world is still dependent on a vast fleet of aging fossil fuels plants, when it comes to new development, renewable projects with massive attached battery storage are already largely outcompeting new gas plants.

“Cheap renewables have killed the economics of gas and coal power generation with carbon capture — and even more so going forward,” Gregory Nemet, a University of Wisconsin professor who studies the public policy of technological change, told The Hill.

The massive expansion in renewable energy, batteries and smart grids was a public policy “miracle,” Nemet added — and one that left little room for the more expensive option of carbon capture, which he noted would also require a massive and politically contentious buildout of new pipelines.

Given the vast expense in building such a system, Nemet said, those focused on powering a low-carbon grid “at some point” have to ask, “Could we do better on a system focused on cheap wind, solar and batteries,” with research and development money spent on making battery storage increasingly long term.

Carbon capture, he said, is “an answer in search of a question.” 

“If your question is what to do about climate change, your answer is one thing. If your question is, ‘What is the role for natural gas in a carbon-constrained world?’ — well, maybe carbon capture has to be part of your answer.”