"Meet the Oil Man in Charge of Leading the World Away From Oil"

On a craggy desert plateau in Uzbekistan, a renewable energy company from the United Arab Emirates is putting up more than 100 wind turbines...

And on the other side of this vast, landlocked Central Asian nation, the same company’s owners, Emirati fossil-fuel investors, are pouring billions of dollars into a gas plant expansion...

Sultan al-Jaber... founded the renewable energy company, Masdar, which has invested billions of dollars in zero-emissions energy technologies like wind and solar power across 40 countries. Simultaneously, he directs Adnoc... Adnoc pumps millions of barrels of oil per day and aims to spend $150 billion over the next five years, mostly to ramp up its output...

And this year, the United Nations has in effect vested Mr. al-Jaber with one of humanity’s most pressing tasks: steering its annual global climate negotiations, which are set to begin in November in Dubai.

Over six months of preparation for the summit, known as COP28, Mr. al-Jaber said, he has consulted everyone from academicians to financiers to Indigenous leaders to fellow oil executives to understand why past summits have yielded such little progress.

His conclusion was that the fossil fuel industry had little to do with it...

Advocates for bold climate action have been outraged by his approach, which rests on bringing fossil fuel companies to the table, and which he claims will break that cycle of recrimination. A group of 133 U.S. Senators and European Union lawmakers signed a letter this year calling for him to be replaced.

A recent Adnoc investment in an offshore oil field overshadowed Masdar’s expansion in renewable energy...

“There is a large consensus that investing billions into new oil and gas projects flies in the face of clear warnings we’ve been getting from the scientific community for many years,” said Scott Zimmerman, who manages a database of oil and gas projects at Global Energy Monitor, a research organization.

Mr. al-Jaber said that he foresees Adnoc’s fossil fuel production expanding “as long as the market demands it,”...

“We have gone from being a exporter to an importer of gas, the demand is so high,” Mr. Mirzamakhmudov said. “We must produce more.”...

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