"With numbers you can do anything you like"

Earlier this week, an organisation called Global Witness had a meltdown over the UAE’s state oil company, Adnoc.

The reason for the meltdown: Adnoc was allegedly spending a stunning $1 billion monthly on oil and gas production.

The fascinating calculation was shared with CNBC, which quoted the NGO as saying it had used Rystad Energy data that included “capital expenditure, exploratory capital expenditure and operational expenditure for the period from 2023 to 2050.”

One wonders if they also included overheads in their calculations to make the numbers larger. One might well conclude that they probably did. Because when you have access to numbers you can make them dance to your beat.

The Global Witness meltdown follows a series of earlier meltdowns among climate activists, who were angered by the appointment of Adnoc’s chief executive, Sultan al-Jaber, as president of the next climate talks, COP28.

Those meltdowns, apparently, didn’t work in igniting more widespread anger and prompting the move of the COP28 to, I don’t know, Norway, so more effort had to be put into discrediting the host of the talks.

In response to the discredit attempt, Adnoc said that any figures assumed by Global Witness beyond 2027 were speculation. What a surprise.

While Global Witness was being righteously indignant to CNBC, Ember, the climate think tank, served a nasty surprise to Australia and South Korea. It named them the biggest coal polluters in the world. On a per-capita basis, that is. Oh, and “polluters” refers to CO2 emissions, not actual coal pollution.

In a fresh report, Ember slammed Australia and South Korea for generating three times more than the global average emissions from coal use. On a per-capita basis, of course. China, in case you’re wondering, is third and the only one of the three whose emissions are actually growing.

“The speed of clean transition is not fast enough to help drive fossil phasedown and keep 1.5C within limit,” Ember’s report authors said. How you can keep a thermometer reading “within limit” is a mystery to me but I’m sure Ember knows what it’s talking about.

“Top polluters such as Australia and South Korea decreased their per capita coal emissions by 26% and 10% respectively since 2015. But, as their starting point was far ahead, they still lead in coal pollution by more than three times the world average.”

No mercy, right? Who cares about a 26% decline in emissions when you’re starting from such a high point that nothing short of 100% would do? Sometimes 26% is a lot. Other times it is an insignificant number.