The oil and gas industry is instrumental in adopting technology that could reduce emissions from fossil fuels, as the solution to climate change is not fighting the use of oil and gas, but adopting technology to cut the carbon footprint instead, Mohammad Barkindo, the Secretary General of OPEC, said on Monday.
“We believe that oil and gas are part of the solutions to climate change and the solution lies in technology, appropriate policies and corporate decisions,” Nigerian media quoted Barkindo, a Nigerian, as saying today amid growing civil society campaigns against the oil industry.
“A combination of these solutions would go a long way in minimising the impact of climate change,” according to the secretary general of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
The campaigns against the oil industry further complicate oil producers’ task to ensure access to energy for billions of people around the world, Barkindo said, as carried by Nigerian media.
OPEC’s position that the world will need oil and gas in order to provide access to electricity to more than 1 billion people is similar to that of many oil majors, while climate change activists have been mobilizing in recent years and months to call on the world leaders to pay immediate attention to the devastating effects of global warming.
Last week, OPEC’s Barkindo said that climate change campaigners and their criticism of the oil sector are “perhaps the greatest threat to our industry going forward.”
“There is a growing mass mobilisation of world opinion… against oil,” Barkindo said. Climate change activist Greta Thunberg said that OPEC calling climate campaigners its “greatest threat” was “Our biggest compliment yet!”
Last month, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, said in a report that because of relentless global warming, the world risks plunging into a ‘climate apartheid’—a scenario in which the rich will buy themselves out of the worst effects of climate change, while the poor will be left to suffer the greatest consequences.
