Report: U.N. Gave UAE State Oil Company Access to Climate Conference Communications

The UK Guardian on Wednesday reported that the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), the state oil company of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), was given access to the email system employed by the Cop28 climate summit and has been reading much of the summit’s electronic correspondence.

The UAE is scheduled to host Cop28 in November, and the president of the summit also happens to be the chief executive of Adnoc, Sultan Al Jaber. As the Guardian pointed out, many climate activists were not pleased that a state oil company executive would be running the year’s biggest climate change meeting, even though he is also chairman of a major renewable energy company and former UAE “climate envoy.”

Further irksome to the activists was Adnoc spending millions on public relations work to burnish its “green” credentials and position itself as a sensitive New Age oil company that did not really mind environmental activists trying to wipe out fossil fuels. 

Climate change true believers are very sensitive to “greenwashing,” or companies that ostentatiously claim to be more eco-friendly than they really are for public-relations purposes. The UAE is simultaneously spending billions on “net zero emissions” programs and increasing oil production, and since the Emirati economy is heavily reliant upon the oil industry, the climate faithful suspect Adnoc might be the grandmasters of greenwashing.

These critics were incensed by the Guardian’s revelation that Adnoc had access to the Cop28 email servers, which were supposed to be completely separate from the oil company’s email system.

“This is an absolute scandal. An oil and gas company has found its way to the core of the organization in charge of coordinating the phasing out of oil and gas. It is like having a tobacco multinational overseeing the internal work of the World Health Organization,” thundered French parliamentarian Manon Aubry, who organized a letter to the United Nations asking for Al Jaber to be removed from the Cop28 presidency.

“The Cop28 office has lost all credibility. If we care more about preventing a climate disaster than protecting the profits and influence of fossil fuel companies, we need to react now,” Aubry said.

The Guardian explained it realized Adnoc was rooting around in Cop28’s inbox when it sent an email to Cop28 asking for a response to former U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres calling Al Jaber “dangerous” and the UAE’s climate policies “a direct threat to the survival of vulnerable nations.” 

As is often the case with business and media emails, this inquiry accumulated a number of replies and forwards — and the Guardian noticed the replies coming from Cop28 included text that said “Adnoc classification: internal.”

Challenged on this Hall of Fame oopsie, the Cop28 office in the UAE said it had “sought input from several subject matter experts regarding emissions, including Adnoc” on a number of matters, so those “Adnoc classification” stamps were appearing on a considerable number of Cop28’s emails.

This explanation did not make anyone at the Guardian feel better, especially because Adnoc had previously assured inquiring media organizations that Cop28 email would be kept entirely separate from Adnoc’s, and there would be a “firewall between the two institutions.” Suspicions inflamed, the Guardian brought in some email experts who examined email headers from Cop28 and established the messages were passing through Adnoc servers.

One of those experts, Dr. Richard Clayton of the computer lab at the University of Cambridge, stated that “everything” coming from Cop28 was “handed off” to Adnoc servers.

“The oil company was able to look at all of the email which they were sending out,” Clayton said.

Cop28 officials responded by admitting there was a temporary fusion of email services with Adnoc during a data migration but enraged climate activists declared an “explosive” scandal of unmanageable scale and insisted the U.N. kick Al Jaber out of the Cop28 presidency, or at least take more direct control of the summit.

Al Jaber just wrapped up a charm offensive in Europe, visiting with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Thursday to discuss Cop28 preparations and secure the EU’s blessing for the proposed summit agenda.

Von der Leyen called it a “good meeting” and said she was looking forward to setting “global targets on renewable energy and efficiency to cut emissions” at the upcoming summit in Dubai.