More than 2,400 people connected to the fossil fuel industry registered to attend the COP28 climate summit in Dubai \u2014 a massive representation that\u2019s nearly four times the number that signed up for last year\u2019s climate gathering, according to an analysis published Tuesday. <\/p>\n
Fossil fuel employees and representatives outnumber every country\u2019s delegation except for the United Arab Emirates, the host of COP28, and Brazil, according to the report from a coalition of corporate watchdog and climate advocacy groups, including Global Witness. <\/p>\n
Overall attendance at the summit has also skyrocketed in recent years, with more than 80,000 people registered for the Dubai meeting \u2014 more than twice the number who registered for last year\u2019s summit in Egypt. The report was not able to count how many fossil fuel representatives are actually in attendance, though it has shown registration numbers have been increasing over the years. <\/p>\n
The findings are likely to fuel tensions at the already controversial climate summit, where the future role of fossil fuels, the main driver of the climate crisis, is shaping up to be one of the key sticking points. <\/p>\n
COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber, also an oil executive, has argued the fossil fuel industry should be involved in the summit. <\/p>\n
The analysis from the coalition, which this year organized under the name Kick Big Polluters Out, looked at the provisional list of COP participants to identify registrants with self-declared <\/strong>ties to fossil fuel companies or organizations with fossil fuel interests or foundations owned or controlled by a fossil fuel company. <\/p>\n It found an \u201cunprecedented\u201d\u00a02,456 fossil fuel employees and representatives\u00a0registered to attend COP28, significantly more than the 636 who signed up for COP27 in Egypt in 2022. <\/p>\n This year\u2019s analysis was made easier by the United Nations\u2019 decision in June that for the first time it would require fossil fuel lobbyists to disclose their affiliations when registering for the summit. <\/p>\n Fossil fuel employees and representatives received more passes to COP28 than all the delegates from the 10 most climate-vulnerable countries combined, according to\u00a0the research. <\/p>\n \u201cThe hallways and negotiating rooms of this climate conference are flooded with the largest number of fossil fuel lobbyists ever,\u201d said Lili Fuhr, director of the fossil fuel energy program at the Center for International Environmental Law. <\/p>\n Some scientists and advocacy groups have expressed increasing concerns about the ambition levels of the summit after recently resurfaced comments made by Al Jaber in the run up to COP28. In a recorded panel session last month, he told participants there was \u201cno science\u201d that said phasing out fossil fuels was necessary to meet the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees. <\/p>\n After the remarks came to light on Sunday, Al Jaber fiercely defended his commitment to climate goals and science. At a news conference Monday, he told reporters his remarks had been misinterpreted and that a phase-down and phase-out of fossil fuels was \u201cinevitable\u201d and \u201cessential.\u201d <\/p>\n The number of fossil employees and representatives at COP summits has been increasing over the years, according to the annual report. Attendees connected to fossil fuel companies have attended COP summits at least 7,200 times over the last two decades, according to a KBPO report in November. <\/p>\n\n More than 2,400 people connected to the fossil fuel industry registered to attend the COP28 climate summit in Dubai \u2014 a massive representation that\u2019s nearly four times the number that signed up for last year\u2019s climate gathering, according to an analysis published Tuesday. Fossil fuel employees and representatives outnumber every country\u2019s delegation except for the <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":12535,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-12534","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}