By Paul Bledsoe
The next United Nations climate change conference, COP28 , is scheduled to begin at the end of November in Dubai. Beyond the challenges of getting the world to agree on difficult climate issues, progress may be imperiled by the cloud of war between Hamas and Israel, and also by the choice of the United Arab Emirates as the host country.
The Middle East’s tangled politics and tortured alliances will make gaining unanimity of action on critical climate issues that much harder. Credible analysis indicates that Iran’s long-time support for Hamas, and claims that it helped plan the vicious attack on Israel, had a strategic objective of preventing incipient attempts to renew diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Saudi Arabia and Qatar also find themselves on opposite sides in this crisis, as Qatar has maintained close relations with Hamas for years. That, too, could further complicate efforts to get major oil and gas states aligned.
Yet, hope remains that the conference-hosting UAE — despite deriving nearly one-third of its GDP from oil and gas revenue — can leverage its relationships with other major state-owned energy producers to gain agreements to limit their greenhouse gas emissions, especially of that super-climate-pollutant, methane. Fully 75% of all carbon dioxide and methane emissions from the oil and gas industry come from state-owned companies. Thus, climate protection cannot be achieved without dramatically reducing emissions from the world’s petro-states.
This story was originally published in The Messenger on October 18, 2023.
