Former American Vice President Al Gore highlighted, Sunday December 3, in Dubai, the climate record of the United Arab Emirates, host country of the 28th Conference of the Parties on Climate (COP28). Invited to make a presentation in the plenary room, he notably denounced the carbon footprint of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), the national oil company headed by the president of the conference, Sultan Al-Jaber.
Behind Al Gore, we could see a map of the United Arab Emirates, with its main emitting sites: oil fields, desalination plants, etc.: “Here are major sites of greenhouse gas emissions. All of these are significant broadcast sites in the United Arab Emirates,” said the former Democratic candidate, defeated in the 2000 American presidential election.
Al Gore, a great climate activist, was invited to present the latest data from the Climate TRACE site, the first to estimate, from a network of 300 satellites aided by artificial intelligence, the true emissions of more than 352 million sites across the world, in ten sectors: heavy industry, energy, agriculture, transport, waste, etc.
While the greenhouse gas data usually cited for countries is statistical, Climate TRACE literally “sees” carbon dioxide (CO2) or methane escaping, the latter often through leaks from gas pipelines or of wells. These new data, published on Sunday for the year 2022, show that the United Arab Emirates' greenhouse gas emissions increased by 7.54% compared to 2021.
“We can see the broadcasts from space”
“The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company still claims to have no methane or other emissions from its oil and gas transportation,” continued the former vice president of Bill Clinton. “But actually there is! We can see them from space,” he says in front of the image of a blue spot above a hydrocarbon field, projected on the room’s giant screen.
Adnoc, led like COP28 by Sultan Al-Jaber, announced in 2022 a target to reduce its methane emissions by 2025.
Al Gore, however, also congratulated the COP28 presidency for the commitment made on Saturday by fifty major oil and gas companies to reduce their methane leaks.
Unsurprisingly, new data from Climate TRACE shows an increase in global emissions, to 58.5 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2022, up 1.5% from 2021. Since 2015, the year of the agreement of Paris on climate, the increase reached 8.6%, with only five countries responsible for three-quarters of the increase: China, the United States, India, Indonesia and Russia.
At the start of his presentation, Al Gore received a lot of applause when he called for “getting out of fossil fuels.”
