An Inevitable Showdown With the Fossil Fuel Industry Is Brewing at COP28

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates—The growing momentum at COP28 for a fossil fuel phaseout has not gone unnoticed by the fossil fuel industry, which has sent a record number of representatives and lobbyists to this year’s climate summit. 

A report released this morning by a coalition of nonprofit climate policy watchdog groups shows that at least 2,456 lobbyists for fossil fuel-related industries registered for COP28, almost four times as many as last year.

They outnumber nearly all individual country delegations and there are more than seven times the number of fossil fuel lobbyists than official Indigenous representatives. Fossil fuel lobbyists have received more passes to COP28 than all the delegates from the 10 most climate-vulnerable nations combined.

Still, despite their presence, negotiators at COP28 in Dubai seem to have arrived at a reckoning this week after decades of studiously avoiding any mention of fossil fuels: On Friday, 106 nations, more than half those in attendance, called for the fossil fuel phaseout, based on a realization that it’s not possible to reach the goals of the Paris climate pact unless the world stops burning coal, oil and gas.

The status quo is not an option, said Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s special envoy for international climate action.

“Transformation is the only option,” she said. “It must be clear to everyone that what we are wrestling with here is the energy system of the future. Our goal is clear. Renewables are the future, the end of the fossil age must become tangible here at the COP.”

With trillions of dollars of future profits at stake, the pushback from fossil fuel companies and petrostates will be intense, and COP president Sultan al-Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, has made several statements suggesting he may not support language for an unequivocal fossil fuel phaseout. 

Given the industry’s agenda for expansion and new infrastructure, said Antony Froggatt, a senior policy analyst with Chatham House, a London-based think tank, it makes complete sense that oil and gas energy companies have flooded the zone in Dubai.

“But ultimately their bottom line may not be in compliance with what we need to do from a science perspective and from a climate change perspective,” he said. “There is a conflict of interest and so it is important that they do not have an overriding control within the process and an overriding influence on the outcome of the process.”

Fossil Fuel Companies May “Double Down” on Extreme Right-Wing Parties

Whatever the fossil fuel industry’s army of lobbyists manages to accomplish by the end of COP28, Aaron Thierry, a climate researcher at the Cardiff University School of Social Sciences, said growing political support from conservatives in Europe and the U.S. might become an even bigger threat to climate progress. 

“One of the things that we have to consider is a possibility of a resurgence, a revanchist backlash, where you get the fossil fuel industry doubling down with the support of right-wing political parties,” he said. “We may be seeing that with the current crises, and we saw it with the election of Trump, when the first thing he did was renege on the Paris Agreement.”

During the high-level opening segment of COP28, the far-right Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni recited a litany of climate denier talking points directly from the fossil fuel industry playbook, and big gains by a far-right party in the Nov. 22 elections in the Netherlands could further undermine European Union solidarity on climate action.

“There is a real risk of derailment from the trajectory that we’re trying to stay on, which is to decarbonize as quickly as we can, up to mid century,” Thierry said. “That’s precarious. It’s very easy to get off track from that.”

Political disruptions and conflicts are quickly seized upon by the fossil fuel industry to undermine progress on climate action, he added, citing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an example.

“I’m not saying that was deliberately engineered as a way of trying to disrupt the Paris Agreement,” he said. “ But I think that the oil and gas sector saw an opportunity to disrupt the public conversation that had been in place about normalizing the idea that decarbonization is necessary.”

That uncertainty has led to massive profits for fossil energy companies and increased their political opportunities to secure new leases and licenses, he added.

“So many of these companies, like Shell and BP, have backed away from the climate promises that they made just a few years ago, following the Paris Agreement,” he said. “The geopolitical equation can change very quickly. The consensus is quite fragile.”

Beyond the intense industry lobbying here, the fragile consensus on a fossil fuel phaseout is threatened from within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change by several member states, led by Saudi Arabia, that don’t have any intention of phasing out fossil fuels and participate in the process with the sole purpose of blocking change, said J. Timmons Roberts, a professor of environmental studies and sociology at Brown University and the executive director of the Climate Social Science Network.

“There’s just no other country that has been as consistent in obstructing progress in climate negotiations,” said Roberts, who co-authored a recent report for the Climate Social Science Network that traced the Saudi history of climate obstructionism back to the very beginning of the UNFCCC process. “There are certainly other states, including the U.S., that have almost certainly been riding their coattails or supporting them quietly, but none as unabashedly obstructionist.”

Given the focus on a possible fossil fuel phaseout at COP28, he said this was a good year to highlight Saudi Arabia’s negative influence, which outweighs the efforts of fossil fuel lobbyists at the conference because of the consensus-based structure of the negotiations.

“The Paris Agreement is built on the idea of naming and shaming,” he said, referring to the unofficial means climate-conscious countries use to bring pressure to bear on climate recalcitrant states. “And unfortunately, most of the countries are constrained from effectively naming and shaming. Parties actually don’t have an official way to do that. And countries are afraid to embarrass their colleagues because they’ve got to stand around with them in the negotiating rooms.”

Singling out countries could also damage trade relationships and other delicate diplomatic ties around the planet, “so somebody has to identify what the big problems are,” he said, describing the reason for publishing the report on Saudi Arabia as COP28 started. 

The way the UNFCCC negotiations are structured means that any one country can successfully object to the inclusion of language calling for an unambiguous fossil fuel phaseout, he said.

“The whole process has been constrained by this requirement of unanimity,” he said. “What organization really can manage to muster unanimous decisions on important and difficult and divisive topics? It’s a recipe for gridlock.”

Negotiators at COP28 have another week of talks remaining to try and break the stalemate that has persisted for nearly three decades.