"DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Fifty oil companies representing nearly half of global production have pledged to reach near-zero methane emissions and end routine flaring in their operations by 2030, the president of this year’s United Nations climate talks said Saturday, a move that environmental groups called a “smokescreen.”
Methane emissions are a significant contributor to global warming, so sharply reducing them could help slow temperature rise. If the companies carry out their pledges, it could trim one-tenth of a degree Celsius (0.18 degrees Fahrenheit) from future warming, a prominent climate scientist calculated and told The Associated Press. That is about how much the Earth is currently warming every five years.
The announcement by Sultan al-Jaber, president of the climate summit known as COP28 and head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., comes as he and others have insisted his background would allow him to bring oil companies to the negotiating table. Al-Jaber has maintained that having the industry’s buy-in is crucial to drastically slashing the world’s greenhouse emissions by nearly half in seven years to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with pre-industrial times."
Jon Gambrell, Peter Prengaman and Seth Borenstein report for the Associated Press December 2, 2023.
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