{"id":48077,"date":"2023-02-21T10:48:51","date_gmt":"2023-02-21T10:48:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.climatechangenews.com\/?p=48077"},"modified":"2023-02-21T10:52:23","modified_gmt":"2023-02-21T10:52:23","slug":"uae-fossil-fuel-cop28-al-jaber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.climatechangenews.com\/2023\/02\/21\/uae-fossil-fuel-cop28-al-jaber\/","title":{"rendered":"UAE minister calls for “phase out” of oil and gas"},"content":{"rendered":"

A key minister from the country hosting the next Cop climate talks has called for the “phase out” of oil and gas.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Governments failed to agree on this wording at previous climate talks and this phrase is likely to divide nations at the Cop28 summit in Dubai in November.<\/p>\n

The UAE’s environment minister Mariam bint Mohammed Almheiri told the Munich Security Conference: \u201cWe need the oil and gas sector to be with us. We need to shift the way they are doing business and we need to decarbonise what they are doing. We need to then phase out oil and gas in a just way.”<\/p>\n

A Cop battle line<\/h3>\n

At the Cop26 climate talks in 2021, all governments agreed to commit to a “phase down” of coal. This was the first time a fossil fuel had been mentioned in a Cop decision.<\/p>\n

At the next year’s talks in Egypt, a broad coalition of nations including India, rich nations and vulnerable islands pushed for an agreement to phase out fossil fuels, which would include oil and gas as well as coal.<\/p>\n

But a handful of oil and gas producers opposed that language, the hosts Egypt did not include it in the final text and the coalition pushing for it eventually decided not to block the agreement over the issue.<\/p>\n

The battle is set to continue at Cop28. While hosts are supposed to be neutral, they have a lot of power over which requests from governments make it into the Cop draft decisions.<\/p>\n