In Dubai, a ‘Good Vibes Only’ Approach to Climate Change

On a recent trip to the United Arab Emirates, I felt as if I’d entered a fever dream of green exuberance. It was more than two months before COP28, the annual global climate meeting now in progress in Dubai, but the country was already awash in environmental hype. On the highway, banners for an event hosted by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the fossil fuel behemoth known as Adnoc, read: “Decarbonizing. Faster. Together.” A placard in my hotel bathroom asked me to conserve water by using the two-tiered flush, although the flush had only one tier. A friend’s utility bill was labeled “green bill” — although U.A.E. households have some of the biggest carbon footprints in the world.

This tidal wave of good green vibes crashed over my social media feeds in the run-up to COP28. In mid-November, I saw video of the half-mile-tall exterior of the Burj Khalifa — the world’s tallest building and an icon of glitzy, oil-financed consumerism — transformed into a glittery temperature-gauge warning of impending global warming. “Action builds hope,” the text proclaimed. “Hope inspires action. Action delivers action.”

As the climate crisis grows ever more urgent, the U.A.E. is championing a dangerously seductive approach to the problem: insisting that we can invest and innovate our way out of environmental disaster while changing as little as possible about our way of life. This philosophy can be found elsewhere but is most obvious in Gulf petrostates like the U.A.E. Tiny, rich and ambitious, the country is scrambling to prolong its hydrocarbon wealth while rebranding itself as a leader in sustainability.

This posture comes with some startling, and self-defeating, contradictions. The U.A.E. is restoring coastal mangroves, ostensibly to draw down carbon from the atmosphere, improve biodiversity and protect its coastline against rising seas. But it is also building artificial islands that destroy marine ecosystems (including coral reefs) while the coastal villas and high rises on them face a growing risk from flash floods. And in yet another clash of interests, the country’s livability depends on blasting air conditioning and desalinating seawater that largely use fossil fuels: In 2022, renewable energy provided only 7 percent of the U.A.E.’s power.

The biggest paradox of all is Sultan Al Jaber, the country’s top oil executive and the president of this year’s climate summit. To his detractors, those two hats represent an irreconcilable conflict of interest laid bare in remarks at a Nov. 21 event where he claimed there was “no science” behind demands for countries to agree, by the end of the COP meeting on Dec. 12, to rapidly phase out fossil fuels. Such a phaseout is impossible, he said, “unless you want to take the world back into caves.” Experts promptly condemned the remarks as “verging on climate denial,” while citing a growing body of evidence that switching to clean energy could accelerate economic growth. Mr. Al Jaber later said that the remarks had been “misinterpreted.”

In the best-case scenario, Mr. Al Jaber could help convince corporations (including oil companies) to stop damaging the climate. After all, he is an unusual oil executive who also founded and chairs Masdar, a state-owned renewables company, and has pledged to spend $15 billion decarbonizing Adnoc’s operations by 2030, including through carbon capture and electrification. In the past year, the U.A.E. reportedly spent tens of billions of dollars on renewable energy projects in countries from Turkey and Malaysia to Zambia and the United States. Such investments serve several purposes: They diversify the U.A.E.’s revenue streams, burnish Abu Dhabi’s green credentials and cement political and economic relationships globally. At home, the U.A.E. aims to get 30 percent of its energy from renewable and nuclear power by 2030.