OPEC Secretary General Haitham Al Ghais on Wednesday (November 20) told the COP29 climate summit in Baku that crude oil and natural gas were gifts from God, and that global warming talks should focus on cutting emissions not picking energy sources, Reuters reports.
His words echoed those of Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, who used his opening address to the summit to hit back at Western critics of his country’s oil and gas industry, and also described those resources as a gift from God.
“They are indeed a gift of God,” Al Ghais, a veteran Kuwaiti oil executive, said in a speech at the conference.
He said that world governments, which agreed to limit planetary warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels at the 2015 summit in Paris, could achieve their climate targets without shunning petroleum.
“The focus of the Paris Agreement is reducing emissions, not choosing energy sources,” he said.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has said that technologies like carbon capture can tackle the climate impact of burning fossil fuels.
