Top warming talks official hopes for 'course correction' and praises small steps in climate efforts
A top official of upcoming international climate negotiations hopes to prove critics wrong and surprise them with a “course correction” for an ever-warming world
NEW YORK — A top official helping to oversee upcoming international climate negotiations hopes to prove critics wrong — and surprise them with a “course correction” for an ever-warming world.
But don't expect that big a turn.
Adnan Amin, the CEO and No. 2 official at the upcoming Conference of Parties (COP28) in Dubai in late November and December, said he also knows what activists, critics and the head of the United Nations really want — a phase-out of fossil fuels that cause climate change. He said it looks unlikely.
Yet Amin said that while an agreement ridding the world of fossil fuels doesn't look likely, a “phase-down of fossil fuels is inevitable."
In an interview with The Associated Press, Amin demonstrated how the leadership of the climate talks is trying to thread a moving diplomatic needle and praised steps in a decarbonizing direction, however small. Amin’s boss, the COP28 president, is an oil executive; Amin was the founding director of the U.N.’s renewable energy agency. The talks are being hosted by petrostate United Arab Emirates.
The Kenya-born Amin is quick to defend COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber, pointing out that al-Jaber also runs a renewable energy company and was key in the founding of the U.N.’s renewable energy agency in the UAE. He will surprise critics, Amin said.
In 10 years when critics and others look back at the talks, Amin wants to hear amazement.
“I hope they will be saying that ‘we didn’t think that an oil producing country could achieve an outcome on climate of this sort. We didn’t think that a process that we thought was
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