Christian rockers Europe ‘The Final Countdown’Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Five years ago, XR was told that our warnings about the escalation of the climate and ecological emergency were hysterical, exaggerated and scientifically unfounded. It’s now clear that we were right to sound the alarm. There will be groups from all sides telling us that we cannot talk about 2°C yet, that there’s no scientific evidence and that we haven’t seen the global trends — but we must continue to do so. Under the precautionary principle, which makes us put our seatbelts on in case of an accident, it’s vital we up the pressure because the truth is, that even if it was only for one day, even if temperatures will dip again, 2 °C has been breached and the trend is relentlessly upwards.
In this context — in a world that is as bad, if not worse than we predicted five years ago — we are once again seeing world leaders fly, on their private jets [3], to the next Conference of the Parties (COP) on Climate, COP 28. The conference will take place in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates [4], a nation built almost entirely on fossil fuel wealth. COP28 is led by Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber [5], founder and Chair of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) [6]. which has the largest net-zero busting plans in the world [7].
At the same time, indigenous people who work tirelessly to defend their lands — which contain 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity — and whose traditional knowledge is key to designing a sustainable future, are excluded from the negotiations [8].
Before it has even begun, it is clear the COP process has been captured by the fossil fuel economy. We are unlikely to see the rapid, just and equitable phaseout of all fossil fuels coming out of this process.
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[3] Flight Operations to COP28 Dubai – COP28 UAE will take place at Dubai’s Expo City from November 30 – December 12, 2023, with government leaders and dignitaries from all over the globe descending on Dubai for the historic event. Operations to COP 28 in Dubai Jetluxe – Your gateway to COP 28
The group, which reportedly has UAE state backing, is leading the race to buy the British newspaper.
The Daily Telegraph front page. Credit: Steven May / Alamy
The investment fund that has reportedly reached an agreement to buy the Telegraph Media Group has stakes in several oil and gas companies, DeSmog can report.
U.S.-based RedBird Capital has entered into a joint venture to take control of The Telegraph alongside International Media Investments (IMI) of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The two groups have reportedly agreed to provide loans to The Telegraph’s existing owners, the Barclay family, to allow them to pay off their £1.16 billion debt to Lloyds Banking Group. The family lost control of The Telegraph and the Spectator magazine, which is also part of the media group, earlier this year due to this outstanding debt.
News reports suggest that the deal is being backed by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who serves as the deputy prime minister of the UAE, the head of its state-owned investment company, and the owner of Manchester City football club.
Conservative MPs have voiced concerns over the potential purchase and the danger of foreign influence, asking the UK government to use national security laws to investigate the agreement. Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer has echoed these concerns, warning that the deal could undermine “free expression of opinion” and prevent the “accurate presentation of the news”.
The UAE is a petrostate that has the world’s largest oil expansion plans. The state-owned energy company, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), intends to increase its oil production by more than any other fossil fuel firm in the world, according to data from the Global Oil and Gas Exit List (Gogel). Adnoc said that Gogel’s data and assumptions were “incorrect and misleading” but has not provided its own figures.
RedBird-IMI has said that, under its proposal, The Telegraph and Spectator will be managed by RedBird Capital “alone” and IMI would be a “passive investor”.
RedBird Capital trades in a number of core investment sectors, including energy. The firm’s website states that it holds investments in at least six fossil fuel firms: Aethon United, CapturePoint, FireBird Energy, Four Corners Petroleum, Lambda Energy Resources, and Tally Energy Services.
All of these companies are based in the U.S., with a majority operating in Texas.
Aethon United was listed by Enverus Intelligence Research as one of the most prolific private oil and gas producers in the U.S. in 2023. It was reported in 2022 that the firm was considering a public listing that would value it at more than $10 billion.
CapturePoint specialises in carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS), a favoured technology of the fossil fuel industry that it claims will help to limit global warming. The RedBird website claims that CapturePoint is “building out a carbon capture network on the Gulf Coast and in the Midwest”.
There is limited evidence of the efficacy of CCUS at scale. DeSmog recently analysed 12 large-scale CCUS projects around the world and found countless missed carbon capture targets, as well as cost overruns, with taxpayers picking up the tab via billions of dollars in subsidies. Meanwhile, captured carbon is often merely used to extract more oil.
“If this deal goes through, it will pollute our press and the UK’s fight against climate breakdown,” Alexander Kirk, fossil fuels campaigner at Global Witness, told DeSmog.
RedBird Capital also holds an investment in Majority Strategies, a political strategy firm that claims to have worked for every official Republican presidential nominee since 2000. Majority Strategies received more than $27 million during the 2022 election cycle, including $9.2 million from the Republican Senate Leadership Fund.
Responding to media speculation about The Telegraph’s future ownership, the paper’s editor Chris Evans sent an internal memo earlier this week. Seen by Politico Playbook, the memo read: “You’ve been asking me how we can be confident that editorial independence would be protected. At the moment I know no more than you will have read.”
Polly Truscott, a foreign policy adviser at Amnesty International UK, told The Times that: “Any Emirati state ownership of the Telegraph may have serious implications for press freedom in the UK and should be carefully scrutinised by the government. In the UAE, anyone who dares to speak out against the Emirati authorities is likely to be at serious risk.”
The UAE ranks 145 out of 180 in the 2023 Press Freedom Index produced by Reporters Without Borders.
Other sources claim that the bidding process for The Telegraph and the Spectator is still ongoing and that no deal has been finalised. Paul Marshall, the co-owner of GB News, is also reportedly interested in buying the titles. DeSmog revealed in October that Marshall’s hedge fund has $2 billion in fossil fuel investments.
RedBird Capital and the Telegraph Media Group did not respond to our request for comment.
Climate Attacks
A new DeSmog analysis has found that eight in 10 opinion pieces from The Telegraph on environmental issues downplay the climate crisis.
Our analysis, for the six months ending 16 October, found that of the 171 articles covering environmental issues, 85 percent were identified as “anti-green” – attacking climate policy, downplaying climate science and ridiculing environmental groups.
Of the 1,930 opinion pieces published by the paper during this period, nearly one in five (17.6 percent) featured an attack on climate science, policy or environmental groups. Ten writers linked to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s leading climate science denial group, wrote a total of 144 opinion pieces for The Telegraph during the period.
The Telegraph’s print circulation at the end of 2019, when it last released the data, was over 300,000. It had an online audience of 13.5 million in September this year.
World leaders next week gather in Dubai, UAE, to negotiate how to reduce emissions and limit global warming. The COP28 summit is being led by Sultan Al Jaber, the chief executive of Adnoc, which is the world’s 11th largest oil and gas producer. Al Jaber has claimed that fossil fuels should “continue to play a role in the foreseeable future” – a statement labelled as “very dangerous” by former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres.
The UAE has also attempted to emphasise the importance of CCUS in capturing emissions. However, according to an analysis by Global Witness, based on Adnoc’s carbon capture plans, it would take 343 years for the firm to capture all the CO2 emissions it will produce in just the next six years. This week, the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition also revealed that at least 7,200 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended UN-led climate over the last 20 years.
Total trade between the UK and UAE exceeded £25 billion in the year ending Q2 2023, an increase of 47.3 percent compared to the year before. The Gulf state has also pledged to invest £10 billion in “priority” UK industries.
In the year following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the UK imported £2.5 billion in fossil fuels from the UAE. The average monthly value of fossil fuel imports from the UAE increased from £84.4 million in the year to February 2022, to £195 million the year after.
In total, UK fossil fuel imports from authoritarian petrostates surged to £19.3 billion in the year following the invasion – an increase of more than 60 percent.
“This is exactly the kind of conflict of interest we feared when the CEO of an oil company was appointed to the role,” said a Greenpeace campaigner.
Internal records leaked by a whistleblower show that Sultan Al Jaber—who is simultaneously serving as CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and president of COP28—used meetings about the upcoming United Nations climate summit to push foreign governments for fossil fuel deals.
The documents, obtained by the Center for Climate Reporting (CCR) and the BBC, include meeting records, briefings, and emails that indicate Al Jaber’s role as CEO of the United Arab Emirates’ state-owned oil company has bled into his responsibilities as president of the critical U.N. climate talks, validating the fears of climate campaigners who opposed his selection to lead the summit that kicks off Thursday in Dubai.
“Al Jaber, who has continued his role as CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) despite calls for him to step down during his COP presidency, has held scores of meetings with senior government officials, royalty, and business leaders from around the world in recent months,” CCR said Monday, citing briefings it obtained. “The COP28 team has quietly planned to use this access as an opportunity to increase exports of ADNOC’s oil and gas.”
The investigative group found that “on at least one occasion a nation followed up on commercial discussions brought up in a meeting with Al Jaber” and that “ADNOC’s business interests were allegedly raised during a meeting with another country.”
Kaisa Kosonen, policy coordinator at Greenpeace International, said in a statement that “if the allegations are true, this is totally unacceptable and a real scandal.”
“The climate summit leader should be focused on advancing climate solutions impartially, not backroom deals that are fueling the crisis. This is exactly the kind of conflict of interest we feared when the CEO of an oil company was appointed to the role,” said Kosonen. “This summit is the world’s most powerful forum to avert the biggest threat to the survival of humankind, and we urge the presidency to act accordingly.”
“It looks ever more like a fox is guarding the hen house.”
Advocacy groups and lawmakers have been urging Al Jaber to resign from the COP28 presidency since his appointment earlier this year, citing his glaring conflicts of interest as top executive of ADNOC—a company that is planning to expand fossil fuel production despite scientists’ repeated warnings that no new oil, gas, and coal production is compatible with preventing runaway planetary warming.
Al Jaber, who has the support of the Biden administration and other world powers, has refused to step aside, casting further doubt on the prospects of concrete climate progress at COP28.
“Sultan Al Jaber claims his inside knowledge of the fossil fuel industry qualifies him to lead a crucial climate summit but it looks ever more like a fox is guarding the hen house,” Ann Harrison, Amnesty International’s climate adviser, said in response to CCR’s revelations. “The appointment of the chief executive of one of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies to lead COP28 was always a brazen conflict of interests which undermines the meeting’s ability to reach the outcome we desperately need.”
“Documents suggesting he was briefed to advance business interests in COP meetings only fuel our concerns that COP28 has been comprehensively captured by the fossil fuel lobby to serve its vested interests that put the whole of humanity at risk,” Harrison added.
Internal emails obtained by CCR show that COP28 staffers have been instructed to “always” include talking points for ADNOC and Masdar—the UAE’s state-owned renewable energy company—in summit meetings.
“In statements to CCR and other media outlets, the team has repeatedly denied allegations of undue influence by the oil company,” the group said. “For instance, a summit spokesperson told CCR in September that ‘the COP28 staff are separate from any other entity’ and that the presidency’s ‘operations are fully independent and autonomous.'”
“But the leaked briefings, emails, and meeting records paint a different picture,” CCR continued. ” After questions from CCR, a spokesperson also confirmed that one senior member of the summit team who has been deeply involved in diplomatic efforts, COP28’s director of government affairs Mohammed Al Kaabi, works across Al Jaber’s ‘entire portfolio.'”
CCR previously revealed that Oliver Phillips, an adviser to Al Jaber at ADNOC, played a central role in public relations efforts for COP28, which the head of the U.N. has said must be the catalyst for “dramatic” climate action. In June, The Guardianreported that ADNOC was able to read emails from the COP28 office.
Whistleblowers told CCR that COP28 meetings are still “regularly held” at ADNOC headquarters.
Michael Jacobs, a professor at Sheffield University in the U.K. and an expert on climate politics, told CCR that Al Jaber’s actions appear “breathtakingly hypocritical.”
“The UAE at the moment is the custodian of a United Nations process aimed at reducing global emissions,” said Jacobs. “And yet, in the very same meetings where it’s apparently trying to pursue that goal, it’s actually trying to do side deals which will increase global emissions.”
Kosonen of Greenpeace argued that “if the presidency wants to claw back credibility, it can only do so through actions.”
“That means brokering a global agreement for a just and equitable phaseout of all fossil fuels, in alignment with science, and making polluters pay for the loss and damage they’ve caused to communities,” said Kosonen.
At a meeting of climate ministers and officials in Brussels this week, Sultan Al Jaber finally shared his plan of action for the UN climate summit.
Guided by the “single north star” of keeping strict Paris Agreement targets of 1.5C of warming within reach, it covers all of the main areas of climate change.
Al Jaber has split these into four pillars: fast-tracking the energy transition, fixing climate finance, focusing on people’s lives and livelihoods and full inclusivity.
He called on countries to engage in “brutally honest” negotiations at COP28 in November.
His appointment hasn’t come without controversy. Climate leaders and campaigners have voiced a number of concerns calling it a “blatant conflict of interest”.
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Al Jaber says he is approaching COP28 with a “strong sense of responsibility and the highest possible level of ambition.”
