Welcome to what is apparently the latest in a series of posts on how the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is using all the tools in the propaganda ("public relations") handbook to launder its reputation. On top of the sexual harassment allegations facing COPs and the UN writ large, the petrostate has a serious conflict of interest with COP28, and it's got an oil boss using the summit to rehab the image of war criminals under the guise of "inclusion."
But according to fake accounts on Twitter, having the UAE's national oil company’s CEO Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber calling the shots of a climate negotiation is apparently a good thing, because he's also in charge of a clean energy company, which apparently cancels out his conflict of interest… as if most oil companies don't also have token clean energy profit streams or shiny PR distractions.
And if you think using AI-generated headshots on fake accounts promoting the UAE and praising al-Jaber would be as low as the PR team could go in terms of obvious shilling, we have some shocking news. It turns out there's a spokesperson even more transparently unbelievable than literally fake people: the very real CEO of BP, Bernard Looney.
In a letter to the Financial Times, Looney offers a 15-sentence master class in disinformation and how to sound like a fake bot on Twitter in the pages of a prestigious media outlet. It starts with the obligatory reference and deference to the editorial Looney’s letter is responding to, before launching into a defense of the man the Financial Times criticized as an "unwise choice of an oil man as COP president."
The second paragraph describes the UAE's "transformational intent," its "plans to spend" billions on "green innovation" in the future, and the fact that it "already invested nearly $17bn in low-carbon energy." Okay, so it's, like, totally gonna pay for clean energy ... in the future though.
For now, Looney says that "the UAE sits on prolific oil and gas resources – and is committed to net zero." Okay, well, if that last part were true, then it would continue to simply sit on those resources and not exploit them and instead spend 100% of its energy budget on zero-carbon energy. Buuuut that's not what's happening. Weird!
Looney goes on to cite al-Jaber's "challenges" to the oil and gas industry to clean up its act, despite the fact that both Looney and al-Jaber are overseeing oil companies that are continuing to operate as they would in a world where fossil fuels weren’t causing climate change. Looney also praises the UAE because it "understands" the Big Oil talking point that “the energy system of the future has to be more secure and more affordable as well as lower carbon."
Did you catch the rhetorical sleight of hand that lets one Big Oil CEO praise a state-run oil company boss as a climate champ? We'll give you a hint: It's the same tactic al-Jaber used when calling for a "phase out of fossil fuel emissions" instead of a phase out of fossil fuels, which prompted UN Secretary-General António Guterres to call for leaving "oil, gas and coal in the ground where they belong" because there are "far too many willing to bet it all on wishful thinking, unproven technologies and silver bullet solutions."
Okay, back to Looney! By referencing "lower carbon" energy, Looney can describe methane gas and even oil as supposed climate solutions, because they're lower carbon than, say, burning the dirtiest coal possible, or just directly lighting climate textbooks on fire.
And while Looney acknowledges the need to "[invest] much more in the energy transition," he then advocates for "continued investment in today's mainly hydrocarbon energy system” before adding, “In this, the UAE is an exemplar – maybe uniquely so."
Looney is literally just describing the status quo and paying lip service to critics who think that it's a bad idea for an oil boss to run climate negotiations, while also making it clear to shareholders that they don't intend to actually change anything about their business.
To conclude, Looney claims that "if people want a truly transformative COP28, let's get behind a country of action on climate change and support the UAE and Dr Al-Jaber's leadership of this vital process."
How is a "continued investment in today's mainly hydrocarbon energy system" supposed to lead to a "truly transformative" outcome?
It's not.
But it sure sounds good!