COP28: Energy Day roiled by outrage over oil lobbyists amid alarming climate change reports

COP28 UAE

Global emissions from burning fossil fuels will again smash records this year, scientists warned in the 2023 Global Carbon Budget report, which will accelerate climate change and lead to more extreme weather events. Cyclone Michaung ravaging Chennai and India’s east coast is a case in point. Global action to reduce fossil fuels is not happening quickly enough, the scientists said on Tuesday, which was designated as Energy Day at the Dubai climate summit. Their findings were corroborated by another report by Climate Action Tracker.

“Action to reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuels remains painfully slow,” said lead author Pierre Friedlingstein, professor at Exeter University in the UK. “It now looks inevitable we will overshoot the 1.5 degrees Celsius target of the Paris Agreement, and leaders meeting at COP28 will have to agree to rapid cuts in fossil fuel emissions even to keep the 2 degrees target alive.”

COP 28

The 2015 Paris climate pact aims to keep global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial times and make efforts to contain it within 1.5 degrees. The issue of phasing out fossil fuels is the most contentious in the 28th Conference of Parties (COP28) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that is currently meeting in Dubai.

Climate Action Tracker report

Despite promises by national government signatories to the Paris Agreement, global warming projections have not improved since the Glasgow climate summit two years ago amid worsening climate impacts, said the 2023 report by Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific project that tracks 39 countries and the European Union, covering around 85 percent of global emissions.

Under its most optimistic scenario, which includes all announced targets in addition to the binding ones, the atmosphere will warm by 1.8 degrees, which is well above 1.5 degrees.

“COP28 must agree to phase out fossil fuels,” the report said. “Everything else is a distraction. Anything less than a clear and explicit commitment to phase out fossil fuels in a COP28 decision is a step backwards.”

The tracker report accused the fossil fuel industry and some governments of still trying to support “every unrealistic techno fix” to see if one of these “false solutions” sticks.

The apprehensions voiced in the two scientific reports seemed to be borne out by an analysis of participants at the Dubai climate meet. The number of delegates at the negotiations who are linked to fossil fuel producers has risen fourfold since last year, said Kick Big Polluters Out, a collective of advocacy organisations.

Furore over fossil fuel lobbyists

At least 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access to the COP28 summit, signalling an unprecedented presence at crucial climate talks from representatives of some of the world’s biggest polluters, the coalition said after analysing the disclosures made by the delegates.

There were 636 fossil fuel lobbyists at last year’s summit held in Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt, up from 503 in the annual meeting held in Glasgow in the UK. Part of the increase this year can be explained by tighter registration norms by the UN to ensure more people had to clearly state who they worked for. But it was not the only cause for the extraordinary rise, campaigners said. “The sheer number of fossil fuel lobbyists at climate talks that could determine our future is beyond justification,” said Joseph Sikulu, Pacific managing director at 350.org, an international environmental organisation. “Their increasing presence at COP undermines the integrity of the process as a whole.”

This year’s climate negotiations have been dogged by controversies from the beginning. The president of the summit, Sultan al-Jaber, is also the chief executive of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, one of the world’s largest oil producing firms. He already has had to defend himself after making statements that appeared to doubt the science that found the burning of fossil fuels as the primary cause of global warming and climate change.