Ok - look - I had to do a line-by-line breakdown of ADNOC CEO and COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber's remarks to Mary Robinson, because they are *so bad*
Ultimately they showcase something simple: fossil fuel companies use words as weapons to protect their bloody profit and even bloodier expansionism
No time for a full thread but here's a quick summary.
Fossil fuel companies take machines and markets that only make sense for the final few percent - and grotesquely stretch them out to cover their entire fossil fuel economy, plus their fantasies of expansion.
Eg: ADNOC "doubling" CCS:
Skipping straight to the meaty core: Al Jaber gives this muddled and confusing mess of statements.
But you can boil it down to something simple: a fast move away from fossil fuels is bad, and a very slow move away from them paired with CCS and CDR is good .
The latter = total climate failure.
"It's impossible to very quickly stop using this product I sell" is not really controversial from a fossil company CEO, but from a COP president, it's utterly unprecedented and COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE.
Because it's not true: eliminating fossil fuels from society very fast is very possible.
To me, the worst part isn't Al Jaber fibbing about the science of transition pace, it's Al Jaber going into a huge, outraged huff about something which isn't just very true, it's even more true than Mary Robinson gently suggests????????
ADNOC WANTS TO BE THE 2ND BIGGEST FOSSIL FUEL COMPANY ON EARTH
Of course the people whose profit comes from greater use of a deadly product hate "finger pointing"
But here's a fact:
Fighting against bad actors is a climate solution. Going to war with them is a contribution. The less power they have, the safer and healthier our lives. Salute me, man. Come on.
The line that people demanding action don't have climate solutions is also the ultimate bad faith gambit.
There aren't perfect solutions for everything, but there are lots and lots of detailed studies setting out potential pathways to Net Zero - or close to it.
The main cause of polarisation and division is people so certain of their own perfect pure Goodness that they assume only a monster would criticise or disagree.
I liked how he was so reasonable about not taking an “alarmist” approach when it was suggested we had a crisis on our hands and then immediately shifted to hyperbole saying “back to the caves”
Reminds me of this YouTube guy I follow on better cities and he was talking about how Chicago sold it's parking meters to a corporation, "If you have a super-massive investment firm that's super-stoked to do a deal with you, DON'T TAKE THE DEAL, BABY!"
The question should be put back to him: “Please help me, show me the roadmap for greenhouse gas emissions drawdown that does not involve a phase-out of fossil fuels. Unless you want our cities to drown, bake, and thirst. Show me?”
It seems these fossil fuels actors want to cement fossil fuels as part of a future by making it "a legitimate part" of the climate agreement, hoping to end a push to delegitimize and end fossil fuel addiction. Good analysis.
🔥🌎🌍🌏🔥 #COP28 meeting in #Dubai with an oil company head presiding is a toxic farce. It should have met in a drowning Pacific nation like #Vanuatu or #Tuvalu (with much less than its ridiculous 70,000 attendees) to give it some real context and a sense of urgency. #drowningislands
Perhaps it was the inevitable 'next step'. Some 25 years ago I heard someone say that god had put the oil in the right place for the right people (they said other things too!) and shortly after I read a claim that 'the West' would have to pay ...
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Great post. I like this analogy: "It is weird to celebrate that your weapons manufacturing facility has a very low rate of gun deaths inside the building. The majority of the harm is caused by supplying fossil fuels into the world..."
Well done. For me, he obviously knows what our whole climate crew is saying is true. How he thinks his country's fancy glass city by the ocean -- in an already hot part of the world -- is going to survive the next 10-20 years I'll never know.
While the irony that uncontrolled climate change will render the UAE literally uninhabitable appeals to me as a just punishment for this kind of thing, the frustration is that by my lights I consider the UAE already to be uninhabitable.
Can we do nothing about these people?
