CNN’s Jake Tapper and PBS' Miles O'Brien explain the danger of fossil fuel influence at COP28

O’Brien: “If you're using carbon capture simply as an excuse to continue drilling, poking holes in the ground to pull oil up and burn it in natural gas plants or continue operating coal plants, you're missing the point.”

Special Programs Climate & Energy

Written by Evlondo Cooper

Published

During an appearance on the December 5 episode of CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper, PBS science correspondent Miles O’Brien discussed how the fossil fuel industry “nearly quadrupled registrations at this year's COP28” in an effort to influence decision making around a controversial and unproven energy technology.

From November 30 through December 12, representatives from nearly 200 countries are meeting in Dubai for COP28, the United Nations’ annual climate summit to negotiate goals and steps related to the mitigation of human-induced climate change. This year’s Conference of the Parties seeks to address numerous important issues, but a key concern is the outsized role that the fossil fuel industry is playing.

Arielle Samuelson in the December 5 edition of Heated highlights how the 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists at COP28 aim to influence negotiations over carbon offset credits, seeking ways to bypass stringent climate goals. 

She writes that their focus on technologies like carbon capture, which would require unrealistic amounts of energy and carbon storage to limit global warming, exemplifies their strategy to avoid reducing fossil fuel usage, which is essential for a sustainable future:

These solutions skirt the real problem—fossil fuels. And that’s the real reason there are so many fossil fuel lobbyists at this year’s COP, because they’ve never had more to lose. Experts say that fossil fuel use has to fall by a quarter by 2030, and by more than 75 percent by 2050. Any delay will endanger the path toward a liveable future, according to the world’s foremost scientists.

Amplifying recent print and online news coverage, the December 5 episode of CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper featured Miles O’Brien, science correspondent for PBS NewsHour, who explained the conflicts of interest inherent in having the fossil fuel industry play such a prevalent role at COP28.

O’Brien also detailed the industry’s efforts to greenwash its products and to push false solutions such as carbon capture in the face of a burgeoning, competitive renewables market.

From the December 5, 2023, episode of CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper

JAKE TAPPER (HOST): A draft agreement at COP28 calls for scaling up carbon capture and removal. That’s a technique that removes carbon pollution from the air and then stores it or reuses it. Now, critics argue this is expensive, it's unproven, and it’s a distraction from policies to address fossil fuels. Still, do you think carbon capture is better than nothing?

MILES O’BRIEN (SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT, PBS NEWSHOUR): Carbon capture has a place, Jake, in tough ones like the production of concrete or steel. But if you're using carbon capture simply as an excuse to continue drilling, poking holes in the ground to pull oil up and burn it in natural gas plants or continue operating coal plants, you're missing the point. We have a green energy revolution, which is working. We have cheaper, better ways to produce electricity and to spend all of this money to [unintelligible] -- well, it smacks of the fossil fuel industry once again continuing their outright lies.

TAPPER: Yeah. Fossil fuel industry employees and representatives nearly quadrupled registrations at this year's COP28 summit compared to last year. Does that make it more difficult to enact meaningful change, or are they partners in this?

O’BRIEN: It does because we're talking about all of this greenwashing. You've got a climate conference that has 100,000 people there and huge numbers of fossil fuel representatives. Just the carbon footprint alone of the event is staggering. But the influence that this industry has, well, it's hard to overstate it, I think.