34 Billionaires Signed Up To Attend COP 28; 1/4 Made Their Money In Fossil Fuels, Beef, Mining, Cement, Petrochemicals

At least a quarter of the billionaires registered as delegates at Cop28 made their fortunes from highly polluting industries such as petrochemicals, mining and beef production, a new analysis has shown. The findings, revealed to the Guardian in an exclusive analysis of the 34 billionaires who are signed up to the UN summit, raise concerns about the influence wielded by ultra-rich, mega-emitters on the world’s efforts to tackle the climate crisis. Together the 34 are worth about $495.5bn. The high number of billionaires at the conference, along with the many private jets they flew in on, suggests Cop may now be second only to Davos as a gathering point for the world’s ultra-rich, who can meet and potentially influence government leaders and senior politicians and bureaucrats, while making deals with other business owners.

The foundation of the Russian oligarch Andrey Melnichenko, for example, is listed as a “climate supporter” on the official Cop28 website, although his companies have reportedly invested $23bn into coal and fertiliser production over the past 15 years. As a close ally of Vladimir Putin and chair of Russia’s committee on climate policy and carbon regulation, Melnichenko is in a powerful position to change Russia’s carbon-intensive economy. He may well be doing that, but his showcase project at Cop is a Pleistocene Park exhibition around a project to restore the woolly mammoth and reverse a 10,000-year-old ecosystem shift.

Melnichenko has faced sanctions by the US and the EU, as has another listed Russian delegate to Cop28, Vagit Alekperov, who owns a 30% stake in the country’s second-biggest oil and gas producer, Lukoil. A Kazakh billionaire delegate, Timur Turlov, who is accused of helping Russian oligarchs evade sanctions through his financial firm, was speaking on a panel about environmental and social governance.

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Schmoozing and networking take many forms. Some billionaires have networked very publicly, such as the Emirati property magnate Hussain Sajwani, who has posted photographs on social media of his encounters with King Charles and the president of Sri Lanka. Others have spoken at events, such as Ray Dalio, the founder of the Bridgewater hedge fund, who is estimated to be worth $15bn, and said climate solutions have to be profitable and the world does not have enough money. At least one billionaire delegate is already in a business relationship with the host nation: the Egyptian fertiliser, cement and sports investor Nassef Sawiris, whose company OCI is helping to develop “blue ammonia” with Adnoc, the oil company run by Cop28 president, Sultan Al Jaber. Britain has also been represented at Cop28 by two of its super-rich, though not billionaires: Rishi Sunak, who is said to be the UK’s richest-ever prime minister with a fortune worth $810m, and King Charles III, who is estimated to be worth about $500m.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/12/one-in-four-billionaire-cop28-delegates-made-fortunes-from-polluting-industries