COP28 president-designate calls for 7% emissions cut, swifter energy transition

 

At the CERAWeek conference on Monday in the southern US city of Houston, UAE Industry and Advanced Technology Minister Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber called on the international community to put in more efforts to embrace renewable energy, advocating an annual cut of 7% in emissions, while eliminating all emissions of methane.

“Houston, we have a problem and failure is not an option,” said Al Jaber, who has been appointed by the Emirates as president-designate of the upcoming COP28 climate summit to be held in Dubai in November. While a number of environmentalists scoffed when the oil state was chosen to host the annual event, the scoffing only grew louder with Al Jaber’s appointment.

Despite numerous doubts surrounding his role in COP28, Al Jaber should be given a chance as he is precisely the kind of ally the climate movement needs. Although he heads the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), he is also the founding CEO and current chair of the Emirati renewable energy firm Masdar.

The world will still require oil and gas for some time and that’s a critical fact Al Jaber’s critics usually tend to ignore. The fight against the climate emergency doesn’t demand us to put an immediate full stop to oil and gas production. Instead, it demands the development of sufficient clean power to phase out the use of polluting fossil fuels as soon as possible.

At Monday’s event, held by the American financial information giant S&P Global and attended by hundreds of people from the energy sector, Al Jaber said the oil and gas sectors need to “do more” to promote the use of renewable energy, while specifically talking about the importance of carbon capture and hydrogen energy technology.

“According to the IEA, in 2022, the world invested $1.4 trillion in the energy transition,” said the senior UAE official, adding “we need over three times that amount”. He emphasised that investment must flow to the developing nations, stressing although 80% of the population lives in the developing economies in the global south, just 15% of clean-tech investment reaches there.