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Thank you, Welcome to Zero. I'm Aaron Rutcoff, executive editor of Bloomberg Green. Some of you listening to this podcast are, not doubt, among the seventy thousand people traveling to do Buy next week for the UN's Annual Climate Summit COP twenty eight. It's a huge event and a lot of the focus and the lead up has been on one character, Sultan all Jobber. He's COP twenty eighth President. He's charged with bringing everyone together and settling the Climate Summit's ambitions.
He is also the head of the United Arabor Emirates State Oil Company ADNAC. This was to say the least a controversial placement. Earlier this year, Zero's regular host akshat Rothi wrote a profile of Sultan al Jobber. I came on the podcast to talk to Acshot about it and ask him basically what someone like al Jobber's leadership would mean for an institution like COP. If you'd like to listen to that episode, we've linked to it in the
show notes. Today we're giving an update about everything that's happened over the past six months before Oxshot and the rest of the Green team goes to COP next week. Oxshot, Welcome to the show.
Hey, good to be here.
All right, let's be honest, Doc Shot. Last time we talked about Sultan al Jobber, you just finish chased them around the world. We published your profile. That was probably the moment of peak Sultan panic in the climate world.
You were having lots of conversations after the profile came out with diplomats and the types of climate people who turn up at COP every year, and many of those people were saying, you know, maybe quietly, maybe not on the record exactly, that they thought COP twenty eight being run by an oil ceo inside one of the world's biggest oil Nations was going to be somewhere between disappointment
and a disaster. But you know, we've got here now, like six months later, on the eve of COP twenty eight, and it doesn't feel like we're really facing down the worst case scenario that some of those people were worried about. To me, it feels more or less like we're seeing the normal kind of disputes and battle lines that happened basically before every single cop.
What do you think you're right for the months after the profile came out, that panic had turned into frustration, sort of bubbling frustration that little progress is being made on clearing up what the agenda at COPP will be, because it's a very important thing to start nailing that
down early. There are just so many issues and so many people who care about those issues that to be able to come to a consensus, you have to start to create what are called in COP language landing zones, where you get many countries agreeing on certain things and then hash out the details so that everybody can on
some of those things. And that just wasn't happening. And when I was in the UAE, I got told a couple of times, look over here, things happen at the last minute, and it does feel like things have happened in the last minute. There are now some real clear landing zones emerging a week before COP twenty eight that
it feels like there will be an agreement. Now, we know by nature of COPS that agreement is never going to be enough, but comparing ourselves to February when I was doing the profile, there's certainly been plenty of progress.
One of the signs of the larger potential for agreement now is the fact that we're seeing some initial two way consensus happening between the US and China, and that's usually like the key piece that has to precede anything that happens in the bigger COP environment. Can you kind of walk us through what we're seeing from those two countries right now?
Yeah, we have two real good examples of this. The Paris Agreement happened because there was a US and China agreement going into Paris said we are going to try and do something on climate, and so it boards well for an agreement going into COP twenty eight that US and China have agreed on having language around tripling renewable energy into the final agreement.
So let's look at that goal, triple renewables by twenty thirty. You know that sounds good, It sounds it sounds really good. I think there's something like sixty countries that have already signaled there on board with this. You got to get up to like almost two hundred, but sixty is a really good start. But if I'm being really honest, this goal also sounds like something that maybe would come to pass almost no matter what. This year twenty twenty three,
even with inflation and high interest rates. In a couple of wars, there's been just an absolutely mind boggling amount of solar built around the world, and especially in China. So is tripling renewables too easy? Should should the goal at copy something harder, like producing fossil fuels?
So just a little bit of context. The reason why we are talking about tripling renewable energy is because this cop is where a technical thing happen, which is called the Global stock take, is the first taking of where things stand after the Paris Agreement was signed, and we knew going into the technical process that clearly, given that emissions are going to hit another new record this year, that we are not on the right path and so it was incumbent upon the Presidency to come up with
the response, a political response from all countries to show that they are willing to try and fill that gap. And so tripling renewable energy is important because it allows for supply of clean energy to increase. The other thing that is likely going to be agreed upon is doubling energy efficiency. Another great thing, because you can use less energy to do the same thing. But you're absolutely right, just because you're increasing clean energy supply does not mean
it will lead to reduction in emissions. And that's why phasing out fossil fuels is going to be a big talking point going into COP twenty Even though the Presidency hasn't yet committed to having that on the agenda, we know that the European Union is pushing for that language. There are some tweaks being made to it, as happens with these UN negotiations. The most recent one I heard was let's call it an orderly phase down off unabated fossil fuels. And maybe that is one place where many
many countries will agree. But it's a fight that we are going to track as we're going to COP twenty eight.
So our colleague Jendaluis who covers the US Climate Envoy John Kerry, and like you, runs around comple like crazy for a couple weeks. She's told us that she thinks the odds are good for finding that phrase that you just said in orderly phase down of unabated fossil fuels, that she thinks there's a pretty solid odds we're going to see that in the final document that has to be produced back insensus. At the very end that final communicate is likely where doctor Sultan, as the president, has
the most amount of leverage. So first I wanted you to give us a breakdown of the jargon that you just used. We got phase down as opposed to phase out, and then there's this word unabated that seems like it's a code for something.
Yeah, it gets jogony so quickly because it's what countries need to agree on. They don't really care if the man on the street understands that language, but it's absolutely crucial to understand that language. We've met with businesses who then take a cop document and read through line by line to see if any of what is being said by these countries could become policy, could affect their business. So unabated is code for carbon capture technologies. This is
something we've covered on the podcast previously. We've had two guests looking at carbon capture technologies both from smokestacks and from the air, and we know these technologies are important and will be crucial, but how much do we deploy
them is a question up for grabs. We know that Sultan al Jabber as the president of COP twenty eight, but the CEO of an oil company wants oil and gas companies to show up at COP with solutions and carbon capture is their favorite solution, and so GENS reporting shows that there may be agreement around unabated because carbon capture technologies are something that many of the players coming
into COP will be pushing for. And then orderly is also code for slow, to make sure that if there are panicky situations like a spike in prices or a supply crunch or disaster like COVID, that would be latitude given for making sure that fossil fuels still are in the mix for a little bit longer than perhaps the science says.
And that's kind of actually what we've seen over the last year or so following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the European effort to get off of Russian gas. We've seen that need for an orderly transition to be a justification for building new gas infrastructure in the US and elsewhere around the world.
Right we have, and that means there's going to be additional lock in of emissions because these assets one s built will have to be paid for through their use in the future. But we have also seen a faster
transition in other places. So even as Europe was struggling for fossil fuels and building new infrastructure such as liquified natural gas terminals that would import natural gas rather than getting it piped from Russia, countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh suffered from not having access to gas, and so they are now rethinking whether they should rely on gas as much when they have access to cheap solar power.
So I want to also ask you to kind of sketch out what these big endgame moments are like. You know, I think at the beginning of cop there's hundreds of leaders from around the world usually present, and that'll be the case this year. Then there's like ten or twelve days of kind of the diplomats and the activists and everybody else kind of buckling down to business and it's
a little less flashy. Then there's a moment at the very end where we get the high drama and everyone kind of tunes back in to see whether or not there's going to be a final We've seen in the past two years that we've been covering these things together, there's been tiers on stage at the very end. There have been angry walkouts or almost walkouts. You've spent this year trying to understand sultanal job or how he works,
how he wields power. So how do you think this year's endgame is going to play out with him sort of at the podium bringing this all to a close.
Yeah, it's quite intense because you've been working for this two week period of intense work. You're putting in ten twelve fourteen hour days. By the end, people are running on very little sleep, and so you do get a
lot of emotions coming out during the final negotiations. And the tears you mentioned were at COP twenty six where there was a last minute change that India and China and the US requested around the word phase out being turned into phase down and island nations were furious, but they let it go and Alok Sharma, who is the president in the UK, car up broke down. And if you're speaking plainly, there isn't very much difference between face
down and phase out. But if it goes in a document that's agreed by two hundred countries, there is a difference. One says you will eventually not use fossil fuels. The other says you'll just keep using less and less fossil fuels. So it was a fight. May I don't know if it was worth having, but there you go. We face those situations as we go into the negotiations. Now, Sultan al Jabber as President has a pedigree of running big organizations. He built a clean energy company called Mastar and is
now chairman of it. He now runs at Not one of the world's largest oil companies, and he has been empowered by the President of UE to be a minister in the government and commit to duties as a minister. But the role he is sitting in now is a very unique role. You have to bring two hundred countries to a consensus. It requires lots of delicate conversations, lots of give and take, and these are things that, at least from our reporting, are not things that Sultan al
Jabber has done in the past. He's been a climate diplomat, but he hasn't been the leader who runs and who decides which is the place that there will be most agreement on. So that's probably the final test for Sultan al Jabber. Now that he has an agenda that seems to move the ball a little bit, will he actually be able to get all those countries to agree.
So let's talk about money, because that's certainly one of the levers that are very wealthy country like the UAE has to pull here. It's always been one of the core central frustrations and disputes between rich and poor countries at cop where is the climate money going to come from?
Just now, before we sat down to talk, there was a headline that ran that for the first time, after a decade of failing to reach one hundred billion dollars, the rich countries in the world, the Europeans, the United States, have finally met the goal of honeying up one hundred billion dollars in a year to help finance the climate needs of poorer countries. So I'm wondering with that as a sort of really positive sign coming into a week
before COP. Do you think there's a deal to be had between rich countries and the global south on climate finance? What role can Sultan ol Jaber and the UAE play and kind of bringing together leap forward in one of the places where the world's always lag behind.
So climate finance becomes a very complex issue very quickly. And earlier this year we had avinash Parsod, who's an economist in Barbados, come up on the podcast and really explain it in detail, and we'll link to that episode in the show notes. But the simplest way he put it was to think about it in three buckets. The biggest bucket is money that would go to word projects that would reduce emissions. Second biggest bucket is money that would go to deal with the impacts so adapt to
the warming. And then the third biggest bucket would be to compensate for the damages that would be caused by climate impacts going into COP. The one hundred billion dollar figure is for the first two buckets that was agreed on in two thousand and nine and was supposed to
be met by twenty twenty. That slowly developed countries would start giving more and more money every year, and buy twenty twenty they will give one hundred billion dollars every year until twenty twenty five, and then there will be more money coming. But that's for another COP. Finally, it seems according to our reporting that twenty twenty two is
the year they finally met it. But for context, the total energy transition money that we need is four and a half trillion dollars, so it's kind of small money. We're already now looking at the third bucket, the loss and damage bucket, the bucket that caught some agreement at COP twenty seven that there would be a fund created, and we know now that at COP twenty eight there is an outline for what that fund would look like, and those details will be hashed out in the negotiations.
This is where as you say, UAE as a rich country, could make a real difference.
And damage the third bucket. I mean, this is something that gets called, you know, with some dispute behind it, climate reparations. Right, let's just explain how if this lost and damage fund existed, how it would work, who would get to drawn and where the money might come from.
Yeah, those are very live conversations and that's what's going to be negotiated on the outline we've got so far is that in the interim, the World Bank is likely to host the fund. That fund will have to have contributions and very specifically voluntary contributions from all kinds of people, not just countries. Maybe philanthropies will put money, maybe corporations will put money in it. We don't know what the sum,
what the total sum of that fund would be. We also don't yet have rules on how money will be drawn out from that fund or who will be eligible to draw that money out.
We'll be back right after the break. If one of the big ongoing themes of UN climate summits is you know where is the money? You know, one of the answers is the UAE is extremely wealthy financial center. What can we expect to see the UA do to kind of bridge one of these constant gaps?
So a good faith contribution coming to the Lost and Damage Fund from developed countries and the UA would be very very welcome by developing countries, and we're talking about it in billions of dollars. We know that the European Union has already said it will put in quotes substantial amount of money towards the fund. We also heard from John Kerry, the Special Climate on y for the US, who said the US will put several million dollars and
that coused a ton of outrage among green groups. The UA, we understand, has a desire to contribute billions of dollars, but I think it's going to try and bring as many people to the table to contribute money towards this fund so that the fund can be substantial, and that would go a long way in making sure developing countries sign off on some of the major commitments at COP.
So once this starts for the next two weeks, what is sultanel Jober doing during cop And I know we are talking about it like it's just one man, but there's obviously a large staff behind him. But what does exerting the role of president or leader look like in a diplomatic circus like this?
It is a lot of listening to different groups on what are the sticking points, what are the big barriers for agreement, and then coming to a place where the president is able to figure out what could be compromises that one country group could make with another country. Group, so there could be agreement between them, and he left to do this again and again and again for the many things that are there on the agenda. So it's
an exhausting process. Already. He's been doing that all through the year, the listening tour that he talks about, where he's gone around the world trying to understand what is it that countries want. But now in these two concentrated weeks, all that work is going to either pay off or backfire.
Why did the United airb Memorates want to play host here? What's in it for a country bringing this really difficult challenge to their doorstep.
This would be the biggest diplomatic exercise that the UE has committed to in history. We expect many, many were leaders showing up in one country. And yes, it's a big oil economy, it's rich, but it's never hosted anything of this heft before. So the UE is very clear it wants to show itself as the place in geopolitics where it can speak to the US and to Russia, it can speak to China and to the EU that it can be a champion of small island countries and
get more from developed countries. It's a big ask and if Sultan al Jabber can pull that off, that's going to bring plenty of kudos to the UAE, something that they would like to have. But if it goes south, it's also going to risk making true all the criticisms that have been laid on it as an oil economy trying to host a climate conference.
So there are two hot wars underway at the moment right Russia's still invading Ukraine and Israel is in the middle of an invasion of Gaza that followed the attack by Hamas inside of Israel. It's a really bad vibe for a global climate summit that's all about cooperation. So give me your sense. Does that sort of hostile backdrop actually affect the proceedings when you're in Dubai? Does it shape the outcome in anyway?
Well, we can look at what happened when it was just Russia invading Ukraine, which had happened early in twenty twenty two, and going into COP twenty seven, we could already see lots of talk about energy cit security, about quote unquote orderly transition, and perhaps that did lead to not as ambitious an outcome from COP twenty seven as you would have expected. The Israel Hamas conflict has less impact on the energy world has not yet had a huge impact on prices of fossil fuels, so there isn't
a clear outcome yet. But again it's a live situation. Things could go south very quickly. That said, though, there are some tailwinds that we should recognize to the fact that US and China are talking. That Joe Biden and Chi Jinping met at a conference in the US is a tailwind for an agreement at COP. So geopolitics has always complicated. Bringing two hundred countries to one consensus is never easy. None of what's happening in the world right now makes it any easier.
There's one geopolitical wrinkle that I want to ask you about. This is we're about to go into COP twenty eight. We don't know where COP twenty nine is going to be, and that's because of geopolitics. Can you explain why we don't know where we would be a year from now?
So cops rotate between different regions of the world. COP twenty nine was supposed to happen in Eastern Europe, and Russia is blocking any of its allied countries in Eastern
Europe from hosting COP. So we are in that place where even if countries do want to host COP, Russia is going to veto their decision, and so by UNF Triple C rules which are still quite hard to understand, but the best we could make sense of it is that if no country hosts COP, then the UA continues to hold the presidency and the default location for COP becomes born in Germany, which is the headquarters of the UNF Triple C, the climate body that runs the COP meeting.
All right, So you know, looking back at your time at Bloombergreen going to COP, I like to think about your leisure activities. You know you deserve a break too. I don't remember what you did for fun when you were in Scotland at COP twenty six, but last year at COP twenty seven in Egypt on the Red Sea, I definitely remember you haggling over the price of a snorkel and then spending your off hours checking out this
amazing coral reef. So what does a climate nerd like you look forward to doing for fun in the glam oil city of Dubai.
Oh, it is such a good question. I have been to the UE before, but never to the Bay, and I've been told it's a crazy metropolis that one has to see because nothing like it exists anywhere else. So I might actually go out and be a tourist and see the Bai, maybe go up the burges Al Khalifa, the tallest building there is.
It's a good answer. I want to also bring this to a close by talking about your book Climate Capitalism. It's great, highly recommend it. It definitely has this climate positive point of view about what is capable based on human ingenuity and cooperation and effort in terms of bending the needle in the climate fight. It's kind of like a counterpoint to how everything seems to be getting hotter
and worse all the time. So now like kind of channel the climate positive vibe that you take in the book towards COP twenty eight and give me like four or five things that would be signs things went surprisingly well at this COP.
That's an interesting point. Look, I mean, the book was meant to be a book about solutions, and so it's kind of positive and optimistic from the get go. We as journalists write about all kinds of things. We write about all the problems, we do investigations, calling out power, but I think we should also give solutions some space to me. One solution that I think we underplay of COP, which is kind of seen as meaningless, is what happens
outside the negotiating rooms. They're all these side events that happen. They're going to be seventy thousand people coming. The core work is done by a few thousand people. All the others are either coming for a trade show for networking, but also many many announcements we've heard over the years.
Ten countries coming together to sign an agreement on deforestation, thirty countries coming together signing an agreement on methane, and there is very little follow up, and so people rightly feel like these are meaningless things that happen on the side of COP. But recently I came across one example where actually these side things can be quite meaningful. So, in COP twenty six, the Global Methane Pledge was signed.
It said a bunch of countries voluntarily will come together and reduce methane emissions by thirty percent by twenty thirty. It was a small group of countries. That number has grown, and what we have seen is the oil and gas industry specifically took that to heart and has actually been investing in both methane emissions tracking and methane emissions reduction. It is something that we at Bloomergreen have been following and finally we are seeing numbers around investments that are
actually leading to some deployment of solutions. So you know, these side shows can sometimes produce meaningful impact, but there will be a lot of dud ones too, all.
Right, So that's one place to look kind of outside of the main event for signs of progress. But what would be the boxes that have to get checked to say this was like a very successful cop.
So in the core negotiations, we already know that tripling renewable energy, doubling energy efficiency are kind of in there will get agreed on. If we get any type of language on fossil fuels with all those caveats attached to it, that will also be seen as a sign of real progress. If we get an agreement on how the Loss and Damage Fund is going to operate, who's going to put money in it, and who will get money from it,
that would be a real success point. If we get money commitment already in the tens of billions of dollars into that fund. That would be huge success, and if we get an agreement on who's hosting COP twenty nine, that would be progress.
We should just remind people that if they don't already get the Green Daily newsletter, we put out two editions a day throughout all COP and we have this really fun checklist that goes over sort of the wins and losses and other weird events that happen. We use emojis and it's actually fun. So sign up for the newsletter to find out whether we meet any of the goals acshot just outlined.
We also dropped the payball on Bloombergreen during those two weeks, and so you can go and read not just all our COP coverage, but all the archive that's been built over the past four years that Bloomberg Green has been around.
Well, Akshat, I'm really excited to watch you work at Dubai and I hope you managed to get some sleep at some point during the two weeks while you're out there.
Well, thank you. Sleep is always a good wish to give to a Copcore.
Thanks for listening to Zero. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple podcasts or Spotify. You can email us at zero pod at Bloomberg dot net. Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd and the senior producer is Christine driscoll. Our theme music is composed by Wonderly Special Thanks this week to Stacey Wong and Kira Bindram for their help on this episode. We've put a link to the article The Oil Shakes
Climate Fixer in the show notes. Zero will be back on Thursday.