World leaders began the curtain-raising prelude to climate negotiations in Dubai on Friday for this year’s global convention on climate change. However, United States President Joe Biden is likely to be a notable absence.
The President of the US, which is the world’s largest producer of oil, above both Saudi Arabia and Canada, is not expected to attend the Conference of the Parties (COP 28) under the United Nations’ framework convention on climate change.
That is bad news for this year’s climate negotiations, which are perhaps the most critical in the event’s history since 1995.
Global climate emissions are predicted to rise in spite of the plans laid out by countries at the landmark COP event in Paris in 2015, with pollution expected to increase 8.8% over 2010 levels by the end of the decade, according to a report released this month by the UN climate change secretariat.
One adviser for small and medium-sized cleantech businesses said in an exclusive interview that he will not be attending this year’s COP negotiations, despite having had a presence in previous years.
Robert Hokin, a cleantech industry veteran, said his firm will not be attending what he called the COP “circus” on climate change because, in his view, it does little to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Instead, the organisation he founded, Greenbackers Investment Capital, which has partnered with solar aeroplane pilot Solar Impulse founder Bertrand Piccard, will be hosting a separate climate event in London this December.
Hokin praised the historic conventions on climate change for agreeing to a US$100 billion fund to help countries tackle the climate threat.
Yet he said more needs to be done to help SMEs in the energy transition.
According to the UNFCCC website, COP pre-sessional events will take place from 24 November until the official opening of COP 28 on 30 November.
Both the key Global Stocktake Technical Dialogue and High-Level Ministerial Dialogue on Climate Finance are due to take place between now and the official start of the event.
“The first ‘global stock-take' points to current actions being insufficient to meet Paris Agreement targets,” warned Martin Wilkie, a capital goods research analyst at Citi, who highlighted the risks of the US’s plan to repeal clean energy tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act.
“We think the chances of the world tripling renewable capacity by 2030 are close to zero, but that’s not anywhere near to being what’s being priced in.”
The absence of President Biden is one factor that will be much more important to negotiations than it appears on the surface.
This is because the US remains the world’s largest producer of oil and the second-biggest polluter globally.
The US is the world’s leading oil nation, above Saudi Arabia, Russia, China and Canada.
Those five countries accounted for about 60% of the total global oil production in 2022, which was 80,618,895 barrels per day (bpd), according to the US Energy Information Administration.
In 2022, the US daily oil production figure was more than the oil output of Saudi Arabia, and the nation is also the world’s biggest oil consumer, with significant influence in the global climate agenda.
The United Arab Emirates, the host country of COP28, doesn’t even come close to producing the amount of oil produced in the US, with an output of just 3 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude and other liquids, making it the seventh-largest global producer.
More potentially rests on this year’s COP convention than ever before, after recent figures suggested that global emissions will rise in real terms, following the agreement in Paris in 2015 to keep global temperature increased within 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The UN estimates those emissions must fall 43% below 2019 levels by the end of this decade to meet the cap on global warming.
That makes it more urgent than ever before for climate leaders to not only agree but take sufficient action to address climate emissions and reduce them to keep global warming within levels that would sustain life on Earth.
“Politicians need to recognize the new financing conditions of renewables and consent to higher subsidies with what happened at the latest New York auctions in November,” said Morningstar’s senior equity analyst Tancrede Fulop.
The goal of COP 28 in the Emirati capital, which is the 28th global convention on climate change, is to keep the global temperature rise within the levels agreed by about 200 countries.
However, the latest modelling suggests the world is on track for about 2.5°C of warming by 2100 even with current pledges to tackle emissions.
The convention will focus on four pillars: fast-tracking the transition to a low-CO2 world; fixing climate finance; focusing on people, lives, and livelihoods; and full inclusivity.
All countries are required to update their nationally determined contributions, or goals, sufficient to meet the emissions target. The global stock-take will assess the progress of countries on those commitments.
Reducing fossil fuels remains inevitable and essential to the low-carbon transition.
Chief executive of the UAE state-owned oil company, Sultan Al Jaber, was appointed as the president of COP28 and argues he is well placed to push for action from the oil and gas industry.
However, some environmental groups and activists have called for the summit to be boycotted, perhaps unfairly, arguing that it is a ‘greenwashing charade’.
It simply will not be possible to meet carbon and global emissions reduction targets while producing oil at the current rate, with some countries planning to expand production, as oil accounts for 15% of energy-related global emissions, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The top ten most polluting countries in 2019 emitted nearly two-thirds of the global carbon emissions, led by China, the US and India.
All of those countries are expected to attend COP28, but some of their leaders may not show.
China, the US and EU have agreed to cooperate, while Biden, Russian President Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping’s attendance looks uncertain.
India, Russia, Iran and Brazil have not confirmed their leaders’ attendance yet, but will send delegates. Japan, Germany, Indonesia and Canada are the only countries in that list to have confirmed their leaders will attend.