In September, the environment minister of Zimbabwe gave control of a huge amount of land – almost 20% of the country – to a foreign company that is not well known. Blue Carbon was a recently started company that was small and led by a chief who was not new to running businesses. He was a royal from Dubai with a wealthy family known for ruling the city for a long time and having a lot of money from oil.
The company Blue Carbon from Dubai has gotten a lot of land in Africa to protect forests from being cut down. This will stop a lot of CO2 from going into the air and causing global warming. The land they got is as big as the United Kingdom.
Blue Carbon can use the conservation to make carbon credits. They can sell these credits to companies and governments. This helps to balance out the pollution caused by burning fossil fuels.
Several agreements to protect forests in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, Liberia, and Tanzania were announced before the United Nations’ COP28 climate summit in December. The summit will be hosted by the United Arab Emirates.
The UAE wants to use up all its oil in 50 years, even though scientists say we should stop using fossil fuels long before that.
A person speaking for the company did not tell CNN if the company will sell the credits to the UAE. However, because the chairman of Blue Carbon is related to Dubai’s ruler, it is assumed by many experts that the credits will be sold to the UAE to help reduce its carbon footprint. They could also be sold to other countries and companies that rely on oil in the Gulf and other places. CNN asked the UAE government to comment.
Blue Carbon did not tell CNN how big its projects are, how much money it has given out, or how many credits it wants to make. The deals are still in the early stages and have not been finished yet.
The company said it will show its deals at a big meeting in Dubai as an example of how to trade carbon. The yearly climate summit is a meeting where leaders from almost 200 countries will gather to figure out how and when to reduce the use of fossil fuels. The UAE will use its COP28 presidency to work hard to make sure that carbon removal is included as a major solution to the climate crisis. This means taking carbon out of the air, not just from forests, but also from burning oil and gas, and then storing it underground.
Climate supporters don’t like carbon removal and scientists don’t think it works well. They think it lets companies keep using fossil fuels and making money.
The UAE stands to lose a lot of money. Last year, oil and gas made up about 30% of the country’s total economic output and 13% of the products it sells to other countries, as stated by the US Department of Commerce. More than 80 countries want to stop using fossil fuels, and renewable energy like wind and solar is becoming cheaper than oil and gas in many places. So, eventually, market forces will make oil and gas go away.
If fossil fuel companies and lobbyists can persuade the world at COP28 to not depend too much on wind and solar power, and to keep extracting oil and gas.
The UAE is getting a lot of criticism because Sultan Al Jaber, who is in charge of the country’s oil and gas company and is their international climate envoy, is leading the negotiations. Over 100 US Congress members and European Parliament members in May asked for Al Jaber to be removed as COP28 president.
Al Jaber doesn’t think it’s a problem to have many jobs at once, he said in several interviews. ADNOC also said to CNN in an email that no one is better qualified to lead the talks. They mentioned his experience leading the nation’s renewable energy and oil and gas companies.
Al Jaber believes that companies that produce gas, oil, or coal should be involved in talks about climate change to make sure that the shift to renewable energy really happens.
Climate advocates don’t believe the argument because they think the fossil fuel industry has had enough time to take action on the issue, but hasn’t. Some companies that sell oil and gas were among the first to realize that their products were causing the Earth’s climate to change. About 40 years ago, they still made money from coal, oil, and gas.
“I believe that ADNOC is using the UN climate negotiations to make people think they care about the environment, even though they are one of the biggest oil companies in the world,” said Jamie Henn, who runs a non-profit group called Fossil Free Media that wants to stop using fossil fuels. “From the beginning, the UAE wanted to host this COP to show that they and their oil and gas industry are working to be part of the solution to climate change. ”
In 2020, the UAE produced about 0. 53% of the world’s CO2 emissions. Even though it has a small population of around 10 million people, it is the sixth-biggest polluter for every person. Even though the UAE has a small number of people, it was the seventh largest oil producer in the world in 2022.
Henn thought it was silly that the talks were being controlled by fossil fuel companies.
The international tobacco control negotiations are being controlled by Philip Morris, just like how they control things. Fortunately, the UN has rules that keep tobacco lobbyists out of the negotiations. “We need that at the COP. ” can be rewritten as “We need that at the conference of the parties. ”
The COP, which meets in a different city every year, has never had so many obvious conflicts of interest. Al Jaber is leading efforts to address climate change and reduce use of fossil fuels. Blue Carbon is closely connected to the UAE’s leaders, making it hard to tell if they support carbon offsets or want to keep producing fossil fuels.
In Dubai, at COP28, they will decide how to buy and sell carbon credits.
When CNN asked Blue Carbon if they were planning to make more deals to reduce carbon in Africa, a company spokesperson said they would announce new initiatives at COP28. A source familiar with COP28’s agenda said the company plans to use the deals to encourage using carbon credits to help with climate change.
Many countries have joined to work with Blue Carbon, and this is not a big surprise. The company that owns it, Global Carbon Investments, has promised to give $1. 5 billion to Zimbabwe as an advance payment for carbon credits. This is more money than the country spends on education and childcare put together, which are Zimbabwe’s largest national expenses.
With not much money coming from rich to poor countries to deal with the climate crisis, carbon credit schemes offer a new way for countries with a lot of forests to make money.
Destroying forests or letting them decay contributes to about 12% of the Earth’s temperature increase. They are important for the environment because they can take in carbon dioxide from the air.
However, many people have criticized the idea of trading carbon credits for not cutting down forests. Some of the largest companies in the world that claim to reduce carbon emissions may be using methods that make their impact on fighting climate change seem bigger than it actually is.
In November, Renat Heuberger, the CEO of South Pole, a company that trades carbon credits, resigned because it was found that they had exaggerated the environmental benefits of their Kariba forest project in Zimbabwe.
We are happy when people spend money to save forests. “Conserving forests is not a quick fix solution,” said Julia Jones, a scientist at Bangor University in Wales.
She said that we need to stop cutting down more forests and reduce emissions a lot. “Balancing the two without big investment in cutting emissions causes problems. ”
Land ownership is also a problem. Sometimes, native people are forced to leave their land so that big companies can make money from it, even though the land used to be seen as worthless.
According to the Forest Peoples Programme, more people are being forced to leave their homes in Kenya because the government is giving land for carbon credits.
“Those who have power over Africa’s forests can make a lot of money, and it looks like big companies are trying to take over Africa’s forests,” said Justin Kenrick, a senior advisor at the Forest Peoples Programme, in an email to CNN. “At the same time, conservation efforts in Kenya continue to follow a flawed colonial strategy of removing the people who are most knowledgeable about how to protect their forests. ”
No matter what happens at COP28, ADNOC, a company in the UAE that sells oil and gas, could benefit a lot. They might win big if they can show the world that they can provide the most energy. The “Minimum Emissions” slogan is a good way to help the environment, even as the earth gets hotter and scientists urge for quick cuts in using fossil fuels.
A spokesperson from ADNOC did not say how many people would go to COP28 for the company, but said that the idea that the company would gain from the conference is wrong.
ADNOC plans to increase the amount of oil they produce by 41% and the amount of gas they produce by 33% by the year 2030. This information comes from a study done by Global Witness, a non-profit organization that focuses on protecting the environment and human rights. This means that its greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 40%, according to Global Witness.
Other oil companies like Shell and BP have different plans than ExxonMobil. Shell’s production is expected to stay the same, while BP plans to reduce their production by 25% by 2030. ADNOC wants to produce more than both companies by 2030.
ADNOC is growing to become a big global oil company. It is buying oil and gas fields in other countries like Azerbaijan and partnering with BP to buy a part of Israel’s NewMed Energy to explore for gas in the eastern Mediterranean. It is also investing in projects related to things like solar and wind energy, as well as chemicals, the company told CNN.
ADNOC can currently produce 800,000 metric tons of something each year. But it wants to make 3 more megatons each year from two new facilities that are not finished yet. Even if ADNOC builds the facilities, it will take them more than 340 years to capture all the planet-heating carbon they are expected to emit between 2023 and 2030. This includes emissions from their operations and the use of their oil and gas.
ADNOC did not mention the calculation in its response to CNN. They only said their goal is to reach zero emissions by 2045 and they have put $15 billion towards this goal.
Before this year, most people probably never heard of ADNOC. Patrick Galey from Global Witness told CNN that the company’s CEO is supposed to reduce emissions at COP28, but the more we learn about the company, the more different it seems.
“ADNOC plans to keep making lots of oil for many years, and wants to become one of the top companies for making even more oil and gas. ”
Surprisingly, COP28 could be where ADNOC becomes a big worldwide oil company.