The chairman of the upcoming climate change summit (COP28), Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, CEO of ADNOC, one of the largest oil companies in the world, recently announced the need to continue exploiting oil to finance the energy transition, to the chagrin of several environmentalists.
Surprisingly, this idea has even spread to certain environmental organizations, which for several years have not hesitated to collaborate with the major oil companies, to admit executives from these companies to their boards of directors and even to receive financing of these (as the journalist and essayist Naomi Klein has already revealed), in a true profession of faith towards a hypothetical and uncertain technological progress which would make it possible to avoid a climatic catastrophe which now seems inevitable.
It is easy to see this paradigm shift among some supporters of the fight against climate change. We need only think of a Liberal Minister of Environment and Climate Change, formerly an active member of Greenpeace, who surprisingly gave his support last year to the vast Bay du Nord oil extraction project off the coasts of Newfoundland during COP27, which had just welcomed oil industry representatives for the first time!
Some might argue then that the appointment of this new COP president directly involved in the oil trade, in complete contradiction to the cause itself, as well as the indolence of so-called environmental defenders are only the culmination logic of our collective refusal to admit the urgency of the situation and to question our way of life… in pure magical thinking.
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