Not long before the crucial final meeting of Cop28 climate summit, a seemingly chance meeting took place in the heavily guarded VIP lounge next to the main conference hall in Dubai. John Kerry, the US climate envoy, and Sultan Al Jaber, the Cop28 president, exchanged warm greetings with Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman Al Saud, the energy minister of Saudi Arabia.
It was only a brief encounter, but it sealed a crucial understanding. Saudi Arabia, the blocker for 30 years of attempts to include fossil fuels in international climate agreements, was not going to stand in the way of this one. Just 24 hours earlier, according to insiders, Al Jaber faced fierce pressure from the Saudi delegation to water down the text. Now, for the first time, the archetypal petrostate would allow a global commitment to be made to “transition away” from fossil fuels.
Minutes later, Al Jaber strode on to the stage where more than 190 countries awaited him. A short announcement, and it was done: the 28th conference of the parties under the UN framework convention on climate change had achieved something no other climate meeting had. Amid applause and relief, the world’s governments had finally agreed to call on countries to begin “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science”.
A deal that satisfied Saudi Arabia, the US and the United Arab Emirates, was not going to please everyone, of course. Indigenous people and climate justice groups said it was unfair and inequitable. Climate scientists acknowledged that the call to transition away from fossil fuels was historic, but said the deal was too weak to enable the world to keep global heating below the 1.5C Paris limit. The statement was vague, scientists said, without targets or dates for emissions cuts, allowing a far greater role for carbon capture than is feasible and backing gas as a “transition fuel”, when most gas reserves must remain in the ground.
The Alliance of Small Island States, countries that face inundation at more than 1.5C, lambasted a “litany of loopholes” in the text. It did not try to prevent the outcome, but Anne Rasmussen, of Samoa, speaking for the group minutes after the gavel landed on the deal, registered its clear feeling that the agreement did not go far enough: “We have made an incremental advancement over business as usual when what we really needed is an exponential step-change in our actions and support.”
Achim Steiner, the head of the UN development programme, said: “Some are understandably frustrated that the agreed language could have been stronger. But it remains the most unequivocal signal to date that the world is moving beyond the fossil-fuel era.”
The final deal also included a $700m (£549m) commitment to “operationalise” a new loss and damage fund, for the rescue and rehabilitation of poor and vulnerable countries stricken by climate disaster. But this was the only real move on climate finance – the money needed for poor countries both to shift to a low-carbon economy and adapt to the impacts of the climate crisis. Poor countries were particularly aggrieved that a promised focus on adaptation fell short.
Harjeet Singh, the director of strategy for Climate Action Network International, said: “Developing countries, still dependent on fossil fuels for energy, income and jobs, are left without robust guarantees for adequate financial support in their urgent and equitable transition to renewable energy. The final outcomes fall disappointingly short of compelling wealthy nations to fulfil their financial responsibilities, obligations amounting to hundreds of billions.”
Committing to these resolutions on fossil fuels will have an impact, however, said Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s climate envoy. “Now the signals are clear,” she said. “If you’re an investor, the future is renewable. Fossil fuels are stranded assets.”
This is an imperfect deal, and a fragile one, and until the final moments there was no guarantee that it would be reached. In the packed hall, relief and loud applause greeted the final statement. Simon Stiell, the UN climate chief, hugged the visibly exhausted but beaming Al Jaber on stage. A giant gamble had paid off.
The signs did not augur well before summit
Holding a climate summit in one of the world’s biggest oil and gas producing countries might have sounded like the punchline of sick joke. The world is failing to control the climate crisis; fossil fuel companies have enjoyed a record bonanza after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; and the chances of limiting global heating to the relatively safe limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels are now all but extinct.
Temperatures this year have been the hottest on record, yet this is likely to be one of the coolest years of the rest of this century. Annual greenhouse gas emissions last year reached their highest ever level. António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, warned: “Humanity has opened the gates of hell.”
The UAE, who hosted the summit, is adding to the problem. It has the sixth largest oil and gas reserves in the world, and its state-owned oil company, Adnoc is embarking on a massive $150bn expansion.
Al Jaber is chief executive of Adnoc. When his appointment as Cop president was announced, in January, campaigners cried foul. Greta Thunberg called it “completely ridiculous”. Tasneem Essop, the executive director of Climate Action Network International, said: “If he does not step down as CEO, it will be tantamount to a full-scale capture of the UN climate talks by a petrostate national oil company and its associated fossil fuel lobbyists.”
The Adnoc boss felt no such qualms. As a businessperson, Al Jaber argued, he was well-placed to bring a can-do mindset to talks that have been characterised by grinding delays and disappointments. If Cops were going to address the causes of the climate crisis, they needed the oil industry at the table.
It may seem incredible that negotiations about climate breakdown should not tackle head-on the issue of fossil fuels, which are its major cause.
In 2021, for the first time, the dirtiest fossil fuel, coal, was mentioned in the text of the final deal, at Cop26 in Glasgow. That triumph was short-lived. At Cop27, in Sharm El Sheikh last year, more than 80 countries formed a loose coalition that pushed for a full phase-out of all fossil fuels. They failed abysmally.
At the start of 2023, it was far from clear that Al Jaber would fare any better. Rather than talk about the decline of fossil fuels, he preferred to wax lyrical on the rise of renewable energy. Early on, he declared that Cop should set a target of tripling global renewable energy generation by 2030, and doubling energy efficiency. (Before taking on his Adnoc role in 2016, Al Jaber was co-founder of the UAE government-backed Masdar renewables company.)
That renewable energy commitment was taken by many as an intended substitute for any language on fossil fuels. Al Jaber also spoke enthusiastically of controversial and costly technical fixes, especially carbon capture and storage, which scientists say will only be able to play a small part in the transition. Rather than refer to fossil fuels as the problem, he preferred to talk about fossil fuel emissions – a much weaker form of words.
Al Jaber was also markedly ambivalent about the goal of limiting temperature rises to 1.5C. For vulnerable countries, this goal is the core of the Cop. But as late as this May, interviewed in Abu Dhabi on the question of whether the world could stay within the 1.5 goal, he said: “I’m not in a position to answer that, honestly speaking. I would be misleading you. What I’m saying is that I and the next [Cop] president and the one after him should stay laser focused and give it our best possible shot.”
This all added up to an impression that Al Jaber, under his confident and sometimes bombastic public persona, would deliver a lukewarm Cop. Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief who oversaw the 2015 Paris summit, publicly rebuked him in May for his “very dangerous” stance.
“He’s trying to dance on two dancefloors at the same time. He is trying to say, look, those of us who are producers of fossil fuels will be responsible for our emissions through enhanced carbon capture and storage. And we, or the Cop presidency, will also support the zero carbon alternatives,” she said.
By the time of a halfway meeting in June, at the UN’s climate headquarters in Bonn, the signs looked terrible. There was no clear steer on whether fossil fuels should could even be on the agenda for the Cop itself. What could you expect, critics sniped, with an oilman in charge?
As world leaders started arriving in Dubai for the opening days of the Cop28 talks, on 30 November, the rhetoric of Al Jaber had been transformed. “[Staying within] 1.5C is my north star,” he said, at a variety of public meetings. “A phase-out of fossil fuels is inevitable and necessary.”
Many developing countries said they had confidence in Al Jaber, that he listened to them, unlike many previous Cop presidents, and appeared to feel their cause. He did an extended global listening tour, from small islands to the biggest economies, meeting Indigenous people, youth representatives, women, and people from disadvantaged communities.
Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, also played a role in shooting down any reliance on CCS, undertaking research that found it would take about $4tn a year to use the technology to allow fossil fuel companies to continue to operate. CCS was “an illusion, a fantasy”, he told the Guardian, and reiterated to Al Jaber privately.
The UAE team recruited a team of seasoned advisers. Most of all, in preparing Al Jaber to deliver a substantial outcome at the Cop, the UN stepped in.
A vital double act and Saudi objections
If Al Jaber got off to an uncertain start, his counterpart in the UN always had his sights firmly fixed. Simon Stiell, a former minister and chief negotiator for Grenada, is executive secretary of the UNFCCC, and combines a forensic expertise in its arcane procedures with a passionate commitment to climate justice, and a vibrant articulacy.
At Cops, the executive secretary and host country president form a double act, the latter listening to the often warring parties and the former guiding procedure and facilitating consensus.
“Stiell and Al Jaber were the perfect combination to deliver results at these negotiations,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser who is now at the American University. “Stiell was viewed as an ultra-honest broker, especially by developing countries, and Al Jaber was uniquely able to gain the support of fellow petrostates.”
For Cop28, the key piece of business would be an obscure part of the Paris agreement known as the global stocktake. Mandated under article 14 of the 2015 pact, this process requires a five-yearly comprehensive assessment of the progress – or lack of it – towards cutting emissions in line with the temperature goals.
It was this stocktake that eventually produced the breakthrough of Cop28 – the resolution to “transition away” from fossil fuels, a phase-out in all but name, one diplomat said. Yet it was only thanks to Stiell that this was possible.
Countries had submitted about 170,000 pages of their concerns; Stiell oversaw their distillation into three short reports. Buried in them was a reference to the need for a fossil fuel phase-out. Stiell had carefully prepared the ground.
By the time negotiations opened in Dubai, a loose coalition of about 130 countries were calling for a phase-out. The EU and the US, among others, wanted to include the qualifier “unabated”, opening the door to CCS, a weaker formulation that angered some developing countries.
As the fortnight of negotiations neared their end, the presidency produced its first draft text of the global stocktake decision. It bombed.
On the plus side, the text dropped the term unabated and kept references to CCS far away from the main proviso, of “reducing both consumption and production of fossil fuels”. But, in the diplomatic jargon for the overarching binding instruction, the language on fossil fuels was framed as one of just a list of options that “called upon parties to take action that could include, inter alia” the main proviso.
“That one word ‘could’ just kills everything,” said Eamon Ryan, Ireland’s environment minister. “It’s not anywhere near ambitious enough.” None of the pro-phase-out group of countries could accept it.
One country could: Saudi Arabia. The Guardian has learned that its head of delegation “appeared pleased” with the draft at this key point.
The presidency team then began an intense round of shuttle diplomacy. It became clear the draft would need to be considerably strengthened.
Finally, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, a new text was drafted that removed the fatal “could” and replaced it with a call for the world to “transition away” from fossil fuels – still a weaker instruction than many would like, but better than what had preceded it. The Saudis were in a bind: publicly criticising the Cop would raise tensions with UAE, its neighbour and long time ally, and risk it being outed on the world stage as the ultimate climate villain.
Asked afterwards, Kerry played down the US role: “This morning I did have a meeting with them, with HRH Prince Abdulaziz, but that might have had no impact at all, they might have thought, ‘get this pest out of here’. Who knows?”
Few can know for sure. But after that meeting, and after Al Jaber withstood “immense pressure”, said an insider, 30 years of Saudi objections were rescinded. The text could pass.
At the close of the conference, Al Jaber returned to his home in Abu Dhabi. He goes back to his job directing an oil firm that is planning the fifth biggest increase in oil and gas production in the world.
For many, this reeks of hypocrisy. Of course Saudi Arabia agreed to the Cop28 deal, critics say – they intend it to have no teeth. Al Jaber was criticised on the eve of Cop28 for attempting to use the negotiations to strike oil deals, an accusation he denied. Al Gore, a former US vice-president and longtime climate champion, said: “[Adnoc] are following their PR firms’ advice, to wait until the final gavel of the Cop in order to launch the vast expansion, one of the largest expansions of any fossil fuel company on the planet. [Adnoc] is one of the dirtiest companies, it’s one of the least responsible companies … It’s a ruse.”
The crucial question for the planet is what happens next. There is a sorry history at UN climate talks of countries unhappy with an outcome in one year trying to unpick it the next. It is often a case of one step forward then two back.
Next year promises to be especially challenging. The hosting has gone to Azerbaijan, a petrostate, 90% of whose export revenues and 60% of whose national budget comes from oil and gas. UAE wanted a successful UN climate summit, a triumph on the world stage. What the Azeri government wants from a Baku Cop may be quite different.
Whatever happens, countries cannot afford to wait for Cops to produce enough progress to end the fossil fuel era. It is not just our production but our use of coal, oil and gas that must fall. Unless governments, businesses and individuals chose to move away from fossil fuels, and that is made a timely, funded and fair choice for all, robust demand will keep the fossil fuel industry afloat. Meanwhile, the clock ticks down and emissions continue their upward march.
