AM Briefing: Al Jaber Plays Defense

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THE TOP FIVE

1. COP28 President Defends Himself Following Controversial Comments

COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber responded to critics on Monday, insisting that he and the UAE “very much believe and respect the science” after The Guardian published a video of him pooh-poohing the phase-out of fossil fuels in an online event that took place ahead of the summit. “I have always been very clear on the fact that we are making sure that everything we do is centered around the science,” Al Jaber, who is also the chief executive of the UAE’s state oil company Adnoc, went on. “We did not in any way underestimate or undermine the task at hand.”

Al Jaber’s ability to lead the climate summit had been called into question after the publication of the comments on Sunday, which he says were taken out of context. Some critics, however, remain unappeased. In an interview Monday, former Vice President Al Gore called Al Jaber “a smart guy … [but] when I look at the massive expansion plan that they have to increase their production of oil [after the conference] … do you take us for his fools?”

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2. The United Arab Emirates Commits $270 Billion to Green Finance

All the attention on Al Jaber took some wind out of the sails of the UAE’s major green financing deal on Monday, needless to say. But the biggest pledge of COP28’s finance-themed day came from the country’s banking sector, which committed $270 billion to green finance through 2030. That’s on top of a $30 billion fund the UAE announced Friday to invest in clean energy, infrastructure, and other climate projects. It’s been previously estimated that the developing world will need an investment of $2.4 trillion a year to address climate change.

Here are some other highlights from finance and gender day at COP28:

• The World Bank shared a new program that will allow developing countries and their national oil companies to access $255 million in grants that target methane emissions.

• Denmark’s Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners unveiled a $3 billion fund focused on wind, solar, and energy storage.

• The Asian Development Bank will pour $10 billion in climate financing into the Philippines through 2029.

• COP28 introduced the Gender-Responsive Just Transitions & Climate Action Partnership, which comes with gender-focused commitments that were joined by 60 signatories.

• A new Associated Press investigation found that “at least 1,300 employees of organizations representing fossil fuel interests registered to attend [COP28], more than three times the number ... of last year’s talks.” The Kick Big Polluters Out coalition put that number significantly higher, finding at least 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists were given access to COP28, outnumbering every national delegation except Brazil’s.

Tuesday’s COP28 agenda is focused on energy and industry, the just transition, and Indigenous Peoples.

3. Report: The Greenhouse Effect of CO2 Gets Worse the More There Is

Carbon dioxide becomes a “more potent greenhouse gas” the more it accumulates in the atmosphere, a new study published in Science found. Previously, the strength of the greenhouse gas effect of CO2 was thought to scale linearly, Science writes. Overall, the paper found that “doubling the atmospheric CO2 concentration increased the impact of any given increase in CO2 by about 25%,” thanks to the gas’s effect on the stratosphere.

While that would imply the planet will heat at an increasingly rapid rate, the report wasn’t all bad news. “[T]hough this effect means that the carbon dioxide added to the air now leads to more warming than it would have a century ago,” writes Science, “it also means that geoengineering schemes to release sunlight-reflecting particles could be more effective than thought by heating the stratosphere and reducing CO2’s strength.”

4. There Are Now Enough Voters Who Prioritize Climate to Swing Key Elections

There are enough voters who prioritize climate issues to potentially swing elections in certain key states, a new 18-state study by the Environmental Voter Project (EVP) has found. It’s not just young voters (ages 18-34) doing the heavy lifting on climate and environment at the ballot box, either; voters who are 65 and older were second to young voters with regards to prioritizing green political issues, with one in six listing “climate change” or “clean air, clean water, and the environment” as their #1 issue.

This is significant, because in states like New Mexico, for example, EVP found that one-third of older voters prioritize climate. And just next door, “EVP identified 230,000 climate voters 65 or older in Arizona, a state where the presidential race was decided by 10,500 votes in 2020,” Inside Climate News reports. Read the full results here.

5. Schools Are Adding EVs to Driver’s Ed Classes

Today’s 15-year-olds will be just 27 when states like California, New York, and New Jersey begin to require that all new cars on the road be zero-emission vehicles. To best prepare today’s learning-permit holders for the future, then, states like Illinois have begun to add electric vehicles to their driver’s education fleets, Yale Climate Connections reports.

Using grants from ComEd, the local utility, “more than a dozen schools” in Illinois have made EVs and chargers available to first-time drivers so far. Educators point out that EVs still have “four wheels, a steering wheel, a brake pedal, and an accelerator” to allow students to learn the basics, but they can also offer features that double as handy teaching tools, like overhead cameras that show how far a vehicle is from a curb during those dreaded parallel parking sessions.

THE KICKER

“There’s always talk about ‘I’ll just wait for technology,’ but the technology is available — there are ways of doing it.” —Massive Attack founding member Robert Del Naja. The band announced on Tuesday its plans for a one-day music festival in August that will be 100% powered by renewable energy.