The COP notes you can’t miss

Nov 28, 2023

Presented by

With help from Allison Prang

THE BIG IDEA

FILE - Sultan al-Jaber, the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., talks during the World Government Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Feb 14, 2023. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili, File)

The United Arab Emirates, which will host COP28 led by Sultan al-Jaber, the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., was caught red handed. | AP

SCANDAL AT COP — Critics who have questioned the choice of the United Arab Emirates to lead this year’s U.N. climate summit must be feeling like their worst fears have been confirmed with news that the host is trying to use the event to woo other countries into fossil fuel projects with its own state-run oil company.

Leaked documents show UAE officials planning to use its perch as COP28 host to promote its liquefied natural gas ambitions in planned meetings with Germany and China and potentially expand LNG in Mozambique, Canada and Australia. The UAE also wants to assure oil-rich Saudi Arabia and Venezuela that “there is no conflict between sustainable development of any country's natural resources and its commitment to climate change.”

The revelations have turned the U.N.’s climate summit upside down just days from kick off, Nicolas Camut reports.

“If confirmed, these news reports add to the existing concerns regarding the COP28 presidency,” Zakia Khattabi, Belgium's climate minister, told POLITICO. “The credibility of the U.N. climate negotiations is essential and is at stake here.”

The UAE’s hosting of this year’s COP has come under heavy criticism ever since Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, the CEO of the country’s state-run oil company, was appointed president of the summit. Al-Jaber is also chair of the board of directors of the national renewable energy company.

The documents, first published by the Centre for Climate Reporting, also shed light on the UAE oil company’s business interests in the targeted countries. Ties with China, for instance, are valued at $15 billion over the last year.

“The climate summit leader should be focused on advancing climate solutions impartially, not backroom deals that are fuelling the crisis,” Kaisa Kosonen, Greenpeace's policy coordinator, said in a statement.

A COP28 spokesperson said in a statement that the documents are "inaccurate."

Also: Don’t look now, but if Russia and other Eastern European nations can't resolve differences over where next year’s climate summit should be held, there’s a chance the UAE could be presiding over COP29, too, Zia Weise reports.

The dispute does come with a potential silver lining, in the sense that the uncertainty could make diplomats less likely to postpone key decisions.

“It’s not uncommon for COPs, when they reach some of the trickiest issues, to kick the can down the road,” said Tom Evans, policy advisor on climate diplomacy and geopolitics at think tank E3G. “I don’t feel like this is an option this time.”

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WASHINGTON WATCH

POWER DUEL — As if transitioning the nation’s grid away from reliance on fossil fuels wasn’t going to be difficult enough, it’s now looking like realizing the Biden administration’s domestic vision will require generating a lot more electricity.

That’s setting up a potential showdown between two pillars of President Joe Biden’s plan: greening the economy and establishing the U.S. as a manufacturing powerhouse for products needed to achieve it, Jeffrey Tomich reports for POLITICO’s E&E News.

As data centers, semiconductor plants, battery manufacturing facilities and electric vehicles take hold, utilities are stretched thin even with record investments in renewable energy and battery storage. The growth in industrial power demand is prompting consideration of new natural gas-fired generation that works against their net-zero goals.

“There's no question there's a challenge,” said Eric Gimon, a senior fellow at Energy Innovation, an energy and climate policy think tank. “It was already going to be hard enough to get to an 80-percent clean [grid] by 2030. Now we need to build more” electric infrastructure.

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AROUND THE WORLD

CARBON CLAMP-DOWN — Key players in the voluntary carbon market are trying to bolster the integrity of an industry that has been rocked by claims of bogus or deceiving carbon offsets as federal regulators consider weighing in.

— Verra, a major standard-setter for carbon credits, released updated methodology for forest-linked credits on Monday. The Washington-based nonprofit started working on the update in 2020 and made changes to things such as how it looks at project baselines.

— The Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative on Tuesday also released additional guidance for how companies can use carbon credits.

— The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Markets is expected to start announcing results for assessments against the Core Carbon Principles it released earlier this year in the first quarter of 2024.

That means that the market will soon know which crediting programs and individual categories of offset projects can be labeled as meeting the council’s CCP criteria. It will be the first round of standard-setting aimed at forming a global baseline for determining which projects meet ICVCM’s bar for measures such as additionality, permanence and avoiding double-counting.

DATA DIVE

PUTTING GREEN IN THE BANK — The cost of the green transition in developing countries could be significantly reduced by making clean energy projects more “bankable,” lowering their risk and using concessional financing instruments.

A new report from Deloitte released today ahead of COP28 shows that those finance strategies might drive down the cost of getting to net-zero by nearly 40 percent in developing countries.

Green projects face revenue, offtake and technology risks that lead to underinvestment and high capital costs. Without concessional finance, which have more generous terms for debt payment, the global transition could cost more than $7 trillion annually on average through 2050, according to Deloitte.

That number could fall to $5.5 trillion per year with blended financial mechanisms: $1 trillion of concessional public finance can mobilize more than $4 trillion of commercial capital, more than half of which could come directly from private capital, Deloitte found.

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YOU TELL US

GAME ON — Welcome to the Long Game, where we tell you about the latest on efforts to shape our future. Join us every Tuesday as we keep you in the loop on the world of sustainability.

Team Sustainability is editor Greg Mott and reporters Jordan Wolman and Allison Prang. Reach us all at gmott@politico.com, jwolman@politico.com and aprang@politico.com.

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