Qatar: Turn to Gas to Fight Climate Change
From Daily News
Qatar on Monday shrugged off criticism of its record-busting carbon emissions and instead extolled the virtues of its key export, natural gas, as it opened a major UN conference on climate change.
At the start of the annual UN talks, Qatar’s deputy prime minister Abdullah Bin Hamad al-Attiyah sought to deflect attention from his country’s reputation as the world’s biggest per-capita emitter of greenhouse gases.
A key issue at the 12-day meeting in Doha will be to review countries’ emissions targets to see if they align with the campaign to combat climate change.
As a result, some observers say the Gulf state of Qatar, as one of the planet’s biggest producers of fossil fuels, is unsuitable to chair the conference.
“We should not concentrate on the ‘per capita’, we should concentrate on the amount… from each country, individually what they produce, because it goes to the air, open space,” Attiya told journalists. He said that “even countries that produce coal” had in the past hosted the UN talks, and sought to portray gas as a safer, more energy-efficient alternative.
