Fifty oil companies, who comprise approximately half of the world’s oil production, pledged at the COP28 summit to reach near-zero methane emissions and end routine flaring by 2030, Sultan al-Jaber, president of the climate change summit, announced. Among the signatories are Brazil’s Petrobras, Saudi Aramco, BP, Shell, and TotalEnergies.
“The world does not work without energy,” al-Jaber commented during a session on the oil industry. “Yet the world will break down if we do not fix energies we use today, mitigate their emissions at a gigaton scale, and rapidly transition to zero carbon alternatives,” he continued before declaring “I know that much more can be done.”
Several environmentalist groups were quick to criticize the move by the oil corporations, claiming that the pledge was simply a smokescreen. More than 300 civil society groups signed a letter opposing the pledge, expressing their desire to phase out oil, coal, and gas in their entirety.