Oil CEO Sultan Al Jaber is ideal person to lead COP 28

ABU DHABI — If the world gets lucky, this could be the year fossil fuel producers and climate activists bury their hatchets and join hands to reduce emissions and ensure our planet’s future.

If that sounds hopelessly Utopian, take that up with the leaders of this resource-rich, renewables-generating Middle Eastern monarchy. The United Arab Emirates is determined to inject specificity, urgency, and pragmatism into a process that often has lacked all three: the 28th convening of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP 28, which the UAE will host from November 30 to December 12. 

To kick off 2023, the oil and gas and climate communities gathered this weekend for the Atlantic Council Global Energy Forum, launching the annual Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week. After decades of mutual mistrust, there is a growing recognition they can’t live without each other.

Thank Russian President Vladimir Putin’s criminal war in Ukraine, and his ongoing weaponization of energy, for injecting a new dose of hard-headed reality into climate conversations. It’s seldom been so clear that energy security and cleaner energy are indivisible. The guiding principle is “the energy sustainability trilemma,” defined as the need to balance energy reliability, affordability, and sustainability.

What’s contributing to this new pragmatism is a recognition by much of the climate community that the energy transition to renewables can’t be achieved without fossil fuels, so they must be made cleaner. They have come to accept that natural gas, in particular liquified natural gas (LNG), with half the emissions footprint of coal, provides a powerful bridging fuel. 

Once derided by green activists, nuclear power is also winning over new fans—particularly when it comes to the small, modular plants where there are fewer concerns over safety and weapons proliferation. 

For their part, almost all major oil and gas producers, who once viewed climate activists with disdain, now embrace the reality of climate science and are investing billions of dollars in renewables and efforts to make their fossil fuels cleaner.

“Every serious hydrocarbon producer knows the future, in a world of declining use of fossil fuels, is to be low cost, low risk and low carbon,” said David Goldwyn, the former State Department special envoy for energy. “The only way to ensure we do this is to have industry at the table.”

Nowhere is this shift among climate activists more evident than in Germany, where Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, the Green Party leader, is serving as the pragmatist-in-chief. 

Habeck, who serves as Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, has been the driving force behind extending the life of the country’s three nuclear plants through April and in launching Germany’s first LNG import terminal in December, with as many as five more to follow.

“I am ultimately responsible for the security of the German energy system,” Habeck told Financial Times’ reporter Guy Chazan in a…