The United Arab Emirates said on Thursday that the head of state oil giant Abu Dhabi National Oil Company would lead this year's COP28 climate summit, fuelling activists' worries that big industry is hijacking the global response to environmental crisis.
Sultan al-Jaber, also UAE's minister of industry and technology and its climate envoy, will help shape the conference's agenda and intergovernmental negotiations to build consensus, his office said in a statement.
"Like last year's summit, we're increasingly seeing fossil fuel interests taking control of the process and shaping it to meet their own needs," added Teresa Anderson, global lead of climate justice at ActionAid, in a statement."Putting an oil CEO in charge of of the negotiations for COP28 is clearly a conflict of interest," said Lisa Schipper, an environmental geographer who served as lead author on last year's U.N.
Demands for governments and companies to leave oil and gas in the ground have gained less traction since Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year and Europe's energy crisis.
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