The host country United Arab Emirates threw money pledges to launch climate mitigation funds, rather than the usual “pledges” to phase out fossil fuels, into the start of COP28. The president of the COP28 conference in Dubai, Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. CEO Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who is also Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, the U.A.E.’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, opened the event Nov. 30 by announcing a “loss and damage fund” for developing countries which suffer large floods, droughts, typhoons, etc., and advancing $100 million to it. Other pledges then made it roughly $250 million. Because the fund was “operationalized” with no requirement for consensus, and put under management of the World Bank for four years, it was greeted as historic by climate NGOs and UN figures at the COP28.
Then, on Dec. 1, Dr. Al Jaber announced U.A.E. was pledging $30 billion to a fund to be called Alterra, to encourage investments in climate mitigation and industrial decarbonization projects, together with BlackRock, Inc. and Brookfield (former Bank of England head Mark Carney’s operation). The aim of this is supposed to be $250 billion in investments by 2030.
Dr. Al Jaber called for “proactive engagement” with fossil fuel companies, to help them phase out their carbon emissions by 2050. He said some national oil companies had adopted net-zero 2050 targets. By contrast, the UN Climate Executive Secretary Simon Stiell, demanded a “terminal decline to the fossil fuel era” in order to stop “our own terminal decline,” and Secretary-General António Guterres called for “a complete phase-out of fossil fuels,” according to Al-Jazeera.
