On the Financial Times' profile of Sultan Al-Jaber, oil man

Stenography is not Journalism

I did my Bachelor's in environmental health before switching to the social sciences and doing a Master's in Cultural Studies and a PhD in Cultural Analysis. Due to that, I have a decent familiarity with the world of STEM¹ while being more at ease in the social sciences.

So when I read an article like the one published on the Financial Times Weekend by Malcolm Moore, their energy editor, I feel like I am losing my mind.

Moore interviewed Sultan Al-Jaber, the Emirati oil man who was given presidency of COP28² because it was the UAE's turn. The interview was uncritical, scarcely different than would have been written by a stenographer. I'm sorry, I don't intend to be mean or anything, but I want to try and explain why I found it profoundly unprofessional. I question the Financial Times for publishing it.

At the top of the page (I got the print version) is a photo of Jaber making a speech with the following quote: “It's time to make energy great again.” Jaber, Moore tells us, calls himself a ‘climate realist’ which is actually not different in any meaningful way from an existing term: climate denier. At the very least, the end result is the same, delaying meaningful climate action while accelerating the causes of climate change, notably oil production in this case.

There is such a thing as ‘soft climate denial’ in the literature. For those who don't know, which evidently includes the FT's energy editor, it essentially means someone who acknowledges that there is such a thing as climate change but downplays its urgency. Jaber opted for a nicer label, that of a ‘climate realist.’

One implication here, which Moore does not explore at any point in his interview, is that actual climate scientists are being unrealistic. Another implication, also unexplored, is that the definition of realism is a solid one devoid of ideology.³ In fact, Jaber himself says that “the world must be more realistic and less ideological about the future of oil and gas” as Moore reports. To be less ideological here means to accept that oil and gas are here to stay, even as scientists have concluded time and time again that oil and gas production must be phased out, and the sooner the better. This is why we have the figure of 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The whole point was to be below it as going above it increases the risks associated with, well, global warming.

There is none of that in the interview, but don't worry Moore did ask Jaber about the weather and food in Coventry after casually mentioning that Jaber has a PhD in business and economics from Coventry university - a field that is famously not climate science. He did however engage in textbook greenwashing by telling us that Jaber founded a company that “recycled some (my emphasis) of the UAE's oil wealth into renewable energy, and today one of the biggest players in the world in wind and solar.” That's not what recycling means, but if you don't pay too much attention you would have the recycling from ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ fame evoked in your mind. All this means is that some of the money generated from polluting and warming the planet was used to build wind and solar. Evidently, not enough, and it certainly does not compensate for the damage caused by oil production.

Here's a publicly available definition of greenwashing that took me nine seconds to find, from the United Nations website, which presumably Moore had access to as well: “By misleading the public to believe that a company or other entity is doing more to protect the environment than it is, greenwashing promotes false solutions to the climate crisis that distract from and delay concrete and credible action.” Instead, Moore wants us to know (and don't ask me why), that Jaber is good at multitasking: “his fondness for multitasking saw him start traveling the world” to (here is quoting Jaber) “to get a deep understanding” of climate change. I.. no comment.

I mentioned at the top that I did three years of STEM as an undergraduate before doing seven years of social sciences. The latter included a particular focus on the politics of language, so this article was both stimulating and exhausting. Stimulating because each paragraph is a textbook case of one thing or another that I've studied, such as the aforementioned greenwashing but also the purposeful misuse of terms like ‘realism’. Exhausting because we're still dealing with the same sh*t so many decades after understanding the root causes of global warming and what must be done.

This is by design. The oil industry has spent billions in the past few decades to place itself in the position it currently occupies, as the ‘realistic’ actor in the fight against global warming. This is no less of a success than the Tobacco industry given privileged access to our media, politics and other institutions for decades in the debates around smoking and lung cancer.⁴ In other words, this is akin to having the CEO of Philip Morris appointed head of the World Health Organisation with the Financial Times spending paragraphs discussing his favorite breakfast instead of questioning how the f- is this normal.

You see, articles like this one are not designed to inform. They are designed to spread ignorance under the veneer of knowledge. It's a thing. Agnotology, or the science of ignorance and how it spreads.⁵

Call it strategic ignorance. Call it misinformative communication. Call it epistemic manipulation or disinformation by omission. The terms you use probably depend on how much malice versus ignorance you assign the author. I don't know that I care too much for the distinction here when the end result is the same: an oil man was allowed uncritical access to one of the world's leading papers to downplay his obvious alignment with the oil industry by giving himself the title of a ‘realist’. Moore softly prepares us for this at the very top of the article by telling us that Jaber being an oil man at the head of COP means he has “two seemingly contradictory roles.” Yes, seemingly. It sure looks like a conflict of interest.⁶ Because it is.

Moore did offer a small critique of Jaber in the end, the most lukewarm statement that can possibly be offered after several paragraphs of stenography. He tells Jaber that the UAE “will feel the extreme effects of climate change long before Europeans” to which Jaber responded with what a businessman who is not a climate scientist would respond: “Yes, but we cannot put everything on climate, we have to think about global development first and foremost” to which Moore adds that Jaber was “puzzled by the question.”

This would have been a great place to wonder why, just why, would this basic question puzzle the head of COP28? It's a question so basic it can be found tackled in virtually every UN report on climate change in the past decade or two. It's so basic I learned it at university as an undergraduate 14 years ago. None of that is explored in the piece.

Moore simply ends it by telling us that the next morning Jaber copy-pasted Trump and declared that “it is time to make energy great again.” Which energy? Again? Did it stop being great? When was that? And just what does great mean? You figure it out, dear reader, because the energy editor of the Financial Times is done with his profile of the oil man who is not a climate scientist but was still given the presidency of COP28 and apparently we now find that normal.

1. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

2. Conference of the Parties, the main decision-making body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

3. This is similar enough to capitalism realism by Mark Fisher. Essentially, the belief that “not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” Jaber simply used the oil man equivalent and got a free pass for it.

4. Here I should say that I worked on a project with OxySuisse on the impact of the Tobacco lobby in Switzerland which involved me reading about how the Tobacco and Oil industries learned from one another for decades.

5. I recommend reading about it, especially if you're the FT's energy editor. There are two useful books on this, from 2008 and 2010 respectively: Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance and Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Anyway.

6. Moore even describes Jaber's entire family as “high achievers” because his two brothers are the UAE's ambassadors to Russia and Bulgaria and his sister co-manages the UAE’s defence sector. (He does also have a sister who is a doctor and who manages a university diabetes center, so kudos to her at least). It couldn't be that the UAE is composed of seven hereditary tribal monarchies with only 10% of the total population being citizens, which may explain the Jaber family's privileged access to power a tad better than the term ‘high-achiever.’