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Rule for COP28: Don't Trust the Fossil Fuel Companies
The oil, coal, and gas industries have a lot to lose in the negotiations at COP28, and a lot to gain from continued diversion, distraction, and delay.
Nov 22, 2023
The 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN FCCC) is set to begin in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, next week. One of the most crucial indicators of success will be whether the nations of the world reach agreement on a fast and fair phaseout of fossil fuels.
Progress on this front depends on protecting the negotiations—and national and subnational policies based on them—from fossil fuel industry interference. This will not be easy. Fossil fuel interests have had a heavy hand in international climate negotiations since they began more than three decades ago. A growing body of evidence amassed by academic research, investigative journalism, congressional investigations, and climate accountability litigation shows that ExxonMobil, Shell and other corporations have conducted campaigns to delay and block climate action. Those campaigns continue today.
As fossil fuel corporations rake in record profits and roll back their pledges to invest in renewable energy, it’s past time for a paradigm shift.
As we near the end of a year of devastating climate change-fueled disasters and record-breaking global average temperatures, the options to limit the worst potential impacts of climate change are narrowing. The fossil fuel industry has a lot to lose in the negotiations at COP28, and a lot to gain from continued diversion, distraction, and delay. Below are my dos and don’ts for COP28 negotiators to give the world the best chance to meet the climate Paris Agreement’s climate goals.
DON’T Trust the Fossil Fuel Industry
Fossil fuels—coal, gas, and oil—are by far the largest contributor to human-caused climate change. Peer-reviewed research by Richard Heede traced two-thirds of all industrial carbon dioxide and methane emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution to just 90 entities—coal, gas, and oil producers and cement manufacturers.
It stands to reason that international climate change negotiations would tackle fossil fuels head on. Yet until two years ago in Glasgow, Scotland, no COP agreements or decisions mentioned fossil fuels, much less did anything to rein them in. The vested interests of investor- and state-owned fossil fuel companies ensured that glaring omission.
Christiana Figueres, who helped negotiate the Paris Agreement as head of the UNFCCC, once believed that the fossil fuel industry should help set climate policy. Earlier this year, she disavowed her previous position. “I thought fossil fuel firms could change,” she wrote. “I was wrong.”
As fossil fuel corporations rake in record profits and roll back their pledges to invest in renewable energy, it’s past time for a paradigm shift. The United States and other nations negotiating in Dubai must recognize that corporations hell-bent on squeezing every nickel of profit out of the planet’s coal, gas, and oil resources have a conflict of interest with climate action. The World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which obligates parties to protect their public health policies from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry, provides a valuable model for insulating national and international policymaking from corporate conflicts of interest.
DO Watchdog Fossil Fuel Industry Presence and Participation
Without protections against conflicts of interest at COP28, the fossil fuel industry will be out in force.
Two years ago at COP26, there were more than 500 people with links to fossil fuel interests accredited as participants, according to an analysis by Corporate Accountability, Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), Glasgow Calls Out Polluters, and Global Witness. If the fossil fuel industry had been a delegation, it would have been larger than the delegation of any country.
At COP27, civil society watchdogs combed through registration lists to identify more than 600 oil and gas industry lobbyists. A more recent analysis by the Associated Press found nearly 400 people with fossil fuel industry ties attended last year’s talks.
In response to demands from elected officials and civil society, new transparency rules are in place for the first time at COP28. Participants must disclose their affiliation, which will be listed publicly. These disclosures are a step forward, necessary but not sufficient for true accountability.
Concern about fossil fuel industry influence at COP28 is heightened because the head of this year’s negotiations is Sultan Al-Jaber, the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. The company plans to invest $150 billion to expand its oil and gas production over the next five years.
DON’T Fall for Fossil Fuel Industry Disinformation and Greenwashing
Under Chair and CEO Rex Tillerson (who served as secretary of state in the Trump administration), ExxonMobil supposedly acknowledged the risks of climate change and claimed to stop funding groups that promote climate denial. But a recent Wall Street Journal investigation of internal ExxonMobil documents revealed that the corporation has continued its efforts to cast doubt on climate science by, among other things, trying to influence the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the independent scientific body that provides the latest science to help inform nations participating in COP negotiations.
According to the internal documents, Tillerson dismissed the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels—and striving to limit it to 1.5 degrees C—as “something magical.” And just months before the agreement was signed, Tillerson asked, “Who is to say 2.5 [degrees C] is not good enough?”
Today, most major investor-owned oil and gas corporations claim to be aligned with Paris Agreement goals, and most have pledged to reach net-zero global warming emissions by 2050, but their actions belie these claims. BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, and other major fossil fuel corporations continue to expand fossil fuel exploration, extraction, processing, marketing and sales while spreading climate disinformation and seeking to block climate action.
A 2022 peer-reviewed study led by Mei Li that drew on the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) Climate Accountability Scorecard found that BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell continue to depend on fossil fuels, with insignificant and opaque spending on clean energy. The researchers concluded that the transition to clean energy business models is not occurring, and that accusations of greenwashing appear well-founded.
These companies have responded to investor demands by setting emissions reduction targets and publishing glossy climate reports. According to Net Zero Tracker, two-thirds of fossil fuel firms have net-zero commitments, but most are largely meaningless because they do not fully cover Scope 3 emissions from the use of their products, which account for 80 to 95 percent of heat-trapping emissions from the oil and gas sector. ExxonMobil, for example, still refuses to take responsibility for reducing emissions from burning its oil and gas products. Moreover, fossil fuel companies’ climate targets that do not include plans to phase out oil and gas are misaligned with the scientific and policy consensus. A report by a UN expert group clearly recommends that credible net-zero targets must include “specific targets aimed at ending the use of and/or support for fossil fuels.”
DON’T Grant the Fossil Fuel Industry Social License
Disinformation and greenwashing pose a growing legal liability for the fossil fuel industry. Dozens of cities, counties, and states across the United States and its territories are suing the fossil fuel industry over climate damages and fraud. The latest climate accountability lawsuit, filed by California in September, documents and seeks to end ongoing climate disinformation campaigns by five investor-owned oil and gas corporations and their main trade association, the American Petroleum Institute. (Read more about the synergy between climate litigation and UN climate talks in this blog by my colleague Delta Merner.)
Fossil fuel defendants are pulling out all the stops to evade accountability and delay justice for people and communities harmed by their products and business practices. Last week, a self-described “hacker for hire” was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison for his role in a large-scale spear-phishing operation that targeted UCS and other public interest organizations exposing disinformation campaigns by ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel interests. While the investigation has not yet revealed who hired the hacker, ExxonMobil has used some of the hacked information in its efforts to thwart legal and public accountability.
At the same time, ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel corporations are trying desperately to frame themselves as part of the solution for climate change and regain their “social license”—their perceived legitimacy among consumers, workers, communities where they operate, investors, policymakers, and other key audiences. At last week’s Asia-Pacific Environmental Cooperation CEO summit in San Francisco, ExxonMobil Chair and CEO Darren Woods dismissed evidence of the company’s climate deception as “what was said 30 years ago or what they think Exxon knew back then.” Then he doubled down on his company’s deception by insisting that the problem is emissions, not oil and gas.
Woods wants us to believe that ExxonMobil can solve the climate change problem with such technologies as hydrogen and carbon capture and storage (CCS). He claims that ExxonMobil has the intellectual and financial resources to “bend the curve on emissions.” But the world’s most profitable oil and gas corporation had that technical and financial capacity decades ago, when its own scientists warned top management of the threat of climate change. Not only did Exxon decide to not apply its resources to leading the energy transition, it instead chose to fund a deliberate campaign of deception. Decades of delay have made the challenge the world faces between now and 2030 much bigger.
DO Secure a Fast and Fair Fossil-Fuel Phaseout
Ahead of the UN Climate Ambition Summit in September, tens of thousands of people marched to end fossil fuels. Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has clearly stated that countries must progressively phase out fossil fuels, “leave oil, coal and gas in the ground where they belong,” and massively boost investment in renewable energy. Guterres also has called for fossil fuel companies to “cease and desist influence peddling and legal threats designed to kneecap progress.”
While ExxonMobil’s Woods has falsely claimed that phasing out fossil fuels would prevent people in the Global South—who have contributed least to climate change—from accessing energy, Global South activists and advocates are among the most committed and powerful voices for a fossil-fuel phaseout. Extracting, processing, and burning fossil fuels is exacerbating health, environmental and social injustices in Black, Brown, Indigenous and low-income communities in the United States and around the world.
As my colleague Rachel Cleetus writes, the phaseout must be fast and fair and must cover all fossil fuels—gas and oil as well as coal. It also must include rapid, deep, direct cuts in fossil fuel use, and the default position of governments at every level should be to reject the expansion of fossil fuel production and the buildout of infrastructure that could remain in place for decades to come. Such approaches as CCS, carbon dioxide removal, and alternative combustion fuels may play a limited role to meet long-term climate goals, but they are not likely to play a material role in meeting 2030 targets, they would not fully reduce environmental injustices and public health harms of fossil fuels, and they are no substitute for immediate, sharp reductions in fossil fuel production and utilization that are necessary now.
Ahead of COP28, more than 650 scientists signed a letter to President Biden urging him to commit to a fast and fair phaseout of all fossil fuels with clear timelines and science-informed targets for the near- and long-term, and supported by finance for low- and middle-income countries for a clean energy transition. The scientists also called on the United States to publicly resist interference by fossil fuel interests, as well as their greenwashing that delays and impedes a fossil fuel phaseout, in the final agreement at COP28.
You can add your voice to this call for bold climate action at COP28 here.
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Amnesty Warns of UAE Surveillance During UN Climate Summit
"It is no secret that targeted digital surveillance has long been weaponized in the United Arab Emirates to crush dissent and stifle freedom of expression," said one campaigner.
Nov 15, 2023
With just two weeks until the next United Nations climate summit, Amnesty International on Wednesday expressed concerns about authorities in the United Arab Emirates using digital surveillance to target COP28 attendees and UAE residents alike.
"It is no secret that targeted digital surveillance has long been weaponized in the United Arab Emirates to crush dissent and stifle freedom of expression," said Rebecca White, a campaigner with Amnesty's Disrupting Surveillance Team, in a statement.
"Prior to his arrest in 2017, human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor faced a string of cyberattacks facilitated by mercenary surveillance companies," she noted. "Known as 'the last human rights defender' in the UAE, Mansoor, who openly criticized the authorities, has been languishing in an Emirati prison for over six years."
In recent months, Amnesty and other groups have called on U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to pressure the UAE to "immediately and unconditionally release" Mansoor and other imprisoned human rights advocates before COP28. Amnesty has also joined other organizations in urging leaders of countries participating in the summit to address the host nation's human rights record and "destructive" climate policies amid a worsening global emergency.
"Amnesty International fears that human rights defenders and other members of civil society in the UAE may continue to be targeted with spyware, including those attending COP28," White said Wednesday. "As hosts of the conference, the UAE has pledged to offer a platform for activists' voices, yet this will not be possible unless human rights, including the rights to privacy and peaceful assembly, are respected."
The pledge she referenced was signed in August by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Simon Stiell and the COP28 president-designate, Sultan bin Ahmed Al Jaber, who is also an oil executive.
Heba Morayef, Amnesty's regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said at the time, "The fact that the hosts of this crucial climate meeting felt the need to highlight that some form of free assembly and expression will be allowed during COP28 serves only to highlight the normally restrictive human rights environment in the United Arab Emirates and the severe limits it places on the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly."
White stressed Wednesday that "the UAE authorities must not engage in unlawful electronic surveillance of conference participants as well as all Emirati nationals and residents. They must also allow COP28 attendees to download privacy-respecting international communications applications like Signal in the UAE to ensure they can use safe, encrypted means of communication."
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Expansion Plans of Top Fossil Fuel-Producing Nations Throw 'Humanity's Future Into Question': UN Report
"We cannot address climate catastrophe without tackling its root cause: fossil fuel dependence," U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said.
Nov 08, 2023
Twenty petrostates responsible for 84% of carbon dioxide emissions in 2021 plan to produce about 110% more oil, gas, and coal through 2030 than is compatible with limiting global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, a United Nations-led report has found.
The 2023 "Production Gap" Report was published Wednesday by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), Climate Analytics, E3G, International Institute for Sustainable Development, and the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP). It found that, if the plans of governments including the U.S., China, and the United Arab Emirates move ahead, coal production would increase until 2030 and oil and gas until at least 2050.
"Governments' plans to expand fossil fuel production are undermining the energy transition needed to achieve net-zero emissions, throwing humanity's future into question," UNEP executive director Inger Andersen said in a statement. "Powering economies with clean and efficient energy is the only way to end energy poverty and bring down emissions at the same time."
The report noted that 17 of the 20 countries it profiled have promised to reach net-zero emissions, but none of them have promised to phase out fossil fuels in keeping with the 1.5°C goal. The production plans outlined in the report contradict the nations' climate mitigation plans and pledges made as of September 2022 and would see coal production increase by 460% more than is consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C, gas by 82% more, and oil by 29% more.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called the report a "startling indictment of runaway climate carelessness."
"Governments are literally doubling down on fossil fuel production; that spells double trouble for people and planet," Guterres said. "We cannot address climate catastrophe without tackling its root cause: fossil fuel dependence."
"The report confirms that the failure by oil and gas producing countries to rein in their production is making climate and economic catastrophe more likely everyday."
The findings come amid what is likely to be the hottest year on record and follow a summer of climate-charged extreme weather events, from historic heatwaves to massive wildfires to deadly floods.
"Fossil fuel emissions are already causing climate chaos which is devastating lives and livelihoods, and we're on course for far worse," Guterres continued. "Leaders must act now to save humanity from the worst impacts of climate chaos, and profit from the extraordinary benefits of renewable energy. That means ending our fossil fuel addiction by shrinking supply, driving down demand, and accelerating the renewables revolution, as part of a just transition."
On a country-by-country level, the nations with the most emissions-intensive plans were India from coal, Saudi Arabia from oil, and Russia from oil, gas, and coal, The Guardian reported. The U.S. had plans to expand its oil production the second most after Saudi Arabia and its gas production the fifth most. The UAE, which is hosting the upcoming U.N. Climate Change Conference, or COP28, had the seventh largest plan to expand its oil production. The upcoming talks are already controversial because their president, Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, is also the head of the UAE's state oil company.
"Despite their climate promises, governments plan on ploughing yet more money into a dirty, dying industry, while opportunities abound in a flourishing clean energy sector," Neil Grant, a climate and energy analyst with Climate Analytics, said in response to the report. "On top of economic insanity, it is a climate disaster of our own making."
The report builds on findings from Oil Change International in September that five Global North countries including the U.S. would drive more than 50% of new oil and gas field development through 2050, with the U.S. behind more than a third of the plans.
"The report confirms that the failure by oil and gas producing countries to rein in their production is making climate and economic catastrophe more likely everyday," Oil Change International's global policy manager Romain Ioualalen said in a statement. "It is a stark reminder that we need an immediate halt to all new oil and gas projects, and for governments around the world to agree to a rapid and equitable phase out of all fossil fuels at this year's U.N. climate talks in Dubai."
Cassidy DiPaola, the campaign manager for Fossil Free Media, noted that the report came on the heels of several contentious decisions by the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to approve major fossil fuel projects, as well as the news that he would not be attending the U.N. talks.
"President Biden's administration has spent 2023 approving massive fossil fuel projects like Willow and the Mountain Valley Pipeline, even as he trumpets climate leadership," DiPaola said in a statement. "His absence from COP28 further calls this leadership into question. How can we take these climate commitments seriously when major emitters like the U.S continue expanding fossil fuel production and infrastructure?"
The U.N. report authors criticized in particular the idea that gas can act as a so-called bridge fuel away from oil and coal.
"We find that many governments are promoting fossil gas as an essential 'transition' fuel but with no apparent plans to transition away from it later," lead report author and SEI scientist Ploy Achakulwisut said in a statement. "But science says we must start reducing global coal, oil, and gas production and use now."
The authors called on the top fossil fuel producing nations to shift course and plan to stop using and producing coal by 2040 and cut oil and gas use and production by at least 75% of 2020 levels by 2050.
"COP28 could be the pivotal moment where governments finally commit to the phaseout of all fossil fuels and acknowledge the role producers have to play in facilitating a managed and equitable transition," Michael Lazarus, a lead author and the director of the SEI U.S. center, said in a statement. "Governments with the greatest capacities to transition away from fossil fuel production bear the greatest responsibility to do so while providing finance and support to help other countries do the same."
Guterres also called for decisive action at the climate talks, which begin at the end of the month.
"COP28 must send a clear signal that the fossil fuel age is out of gas—that its end is inevitable," he said. "We need credible commitments to ramp up renewables, phase out fossil fuels, and boost energy efficiency, while ensuring a just, equitable transition. Fossil fuels are sending essential climate goals up in smoke. It's time for change."
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