A surprise, last-minute addition to the Sundance lineup, the rage-inducing film “Justice” features new on-the-record allegations of Kavanaugh assaulting women at Yale.
Most damning of all, it features a never-heard-before audio recording made by one of Kavanaugh’s Yale colleagues—Partnership for Public Service president and CEO Max Stier—that not only corroborates Ramirez’s charges, but suggests that Kavanaugh violated another unnamed woman as well.
A last-minute addition to this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Justice is the first feature documentary helmed by Doug Liman, a director best known for Hollywood hits like Swingers, Go, The Bourne Identity, and Edge of Tomorrow. His latest is far removed from those fictional mainstream efforts, caustically censuring Kavanaugh and the political process that elevated him to the nation’s highest judicial bench, and casting a sympathetic eye on Ford, Ramirez ,and their fellow accusers.
Liman’s film may not deliver many new bombshells, but he and writer/producer Amy Herdy makes up for a relative dearth of explosive revelations by lucidly recounting this ugly chapter in recent American history, as well as by giving voice to women whose allegations were picked apart, mocked and, ultimately, ignored.
The biggest eye-opener in Justice comes more than midway through its compact and efficient 85-minute runtime, when Liman receives a tip that leads him to an anonymous individual who provides a tape made by Stier shortly after the FBI—compelled by Ford’s courageous and heartrending testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee—briefly reopened its investigation into embattled then-nominee Kavanaugh.
In it, Stier relays that he lived in the same Yale dorm as Kavanaugh and, one evening, wound up in a room where he saw a severely inebriated Kavanaugh with his pants down, at which point a group of rowdy soccer players forced a drunk female freshman to hold Kavanaugh’s penis. Stier states that he knows this tale “first-hand,” and that the young woman in question did not subsequently remember the incident, nor did she want to come forward after she’d seen the vile treatment that Ford and Ramirez were subjected to by the public, the media, and the government. The Daily Beast has reached out to Justice Kavanaugh for comment about the fresh allegations.
Stier goes on to explain that, though he didn’t know Ramirez, he had heard from classmates about her separate, eerily similar encounter with Kavanaugh, which she personally describes in Justice. According to Ramirez, an intoxicated Kavanaugh exposed himself right in front of her face in college, and that she suppressed memories of certain aspects of this trauma until she was contacted by The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow.
As Ramirez narrates in a trembling tone that seems on the perpetual verge of cracking, she suffered this indignity quietly, convinced that she was to blame for it (because she too was under the influence) and humiliated by the guffaws of the other men in the room. Her account is convincing in its specificity, and moving in its anguish.
Ramirez confesses that some of Farrow’s questions made her worried that she still wasn’t recalling everything about that fateful night, and it’s Stier’s recording that appears to fill in a crucial blank. Stier says he was told that, after Kavanaugh stuck his naked member in Ramirez’s face, he went to the bathroom and was egged on by classmates to make himself erect; once he’d succeeded in that task, he returned to harass Ramirez some more.
It's an additional bit of nastiness in a story drowning in grotesqueness, and Liman lays it all out with the sort of no-nonsense clarity that only amplifies one’s shock, revulsion and dismay—emotions that go hand-in-hand with outrage, which is stoked by the numerous clips of Kavanaugh refuting these accusations with unconvincing fury and falsehoods.
Through juxtapositions of Kavanaugh’s on-the-record statements and various pieces of evidence, Justice reveals the many lies advanced by the judge in order to both sway public opinion and to give Republicans enough reasonable-doubt cover to vote in favor of his confirmation.
Moreover, in a lengthy segment about text conversations between Kavanaugh’s college buddies and Ramirez’s Yale classmate Kerry Berchem, the film persuasively suggests that Kavanaugh and his team were aware of Ford and Ramirez’s charges before they became public, and sought to preemptively counter them by planting alternate-narrative seeds with friends and acquaintances.
While Liman relies a bit too heavily on graphical text to convey some of this, the idea that Kavanaugh (or those closest to him) conspired to keep his apparent crimes secret—along with his general reputation as a boozing party-hard menace—nonetheless comes through loud and clear.
Surprisingly, although Ford is seen speaking to Liman just off-camera at the beginning of Justice, she otherwise doesn’t appear except in archival footage. Still, her presence is ubiquitous throughout the documentary, which generates further anger by noting that the FBI ignored Stier’s tip, along with the majority of the 4,500 others they received regarding Kavanaugh. The Bureau instead chose to send along any “relevant” reports to the very Trump-administration White House that was committed to getting their nominee approved.
The effect is to paint the entire affair as a charade and a rigged game in which accusatory women were unfairly and maliciously put on the defensive, and powerful men were allowed to skate by on suspect evasions and flimsy denials.
Justice is more of a stinging, straightforward recap than a formally daring non-fiction work, but its direct approach allows its speakers to make their case with precision and passion. Of that group, Ramirez proves the memorable standout, her commentary as thorough and consistent as it is distressed.
In her remarks about Kavanaugh’s laughter as he perpetrated his misconduct—chortling that Ford also mentions to Congress—she provides an unforgettable detail that encapsulates the arrogant, entitled cruelty of her abuser, as well as the unjust system that saw fit to place him on the nation’s highest legal pedestal.
As officials investigate a mass shooting in Monterey Park, police converged on a second possible scene in neighboring Alhambra early Sunday.
The second possible scene was located at the Lai Lai Ballroom and Studio on 120 block of South Garfield Avenue though it remains unclear whether the two scenes were connected.
According to early reports, officials were searching to see whether the suspect had gone to that ballroom, which was approximately two miles away from the mass shooting in Monterey Park.
"We are aware of an incident that occurred in Alhambra and we have investigators on scene trying to determine if there is a connection," said Capt. Andrew Meyer of LASD during a press conference Sunday morning.
"The investigators are working every lead on this case. We are reviewing all surveillance video and following all leads. We are not going to leave anything unturned," Meyer added.
Alhambra's Mayor, Sasha Renée Pérez, shared a statement via Twitter, indicating·
"To have this tragedy occur on Lunar New Year weekend, makes this especially painful. Monterey Park is home to one of the largest #AAPI communities in the country. This is a time when residents should be celebrating with family, friends and loved ones - not fearing gun violence," Pérez said.
No one was injured in Alhambra. The entire area appeared cordoned off while authorities investigate.
Graham Nash (L) and David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young perform at San Jose Arena on February 4, 2000 in San Jose, California. (photo: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)
"What has always mattered to David and me more than anything was the pure joy of the music we created together," said Nash
Graham Nash remembered his late collaborator David Crosby, who died on Thursday at the age of 81, in a poignant tribute shared on social media. The message was posted alongside a black and white photo of Crosby’s guitar case next to “Willy Nash.”
“It is with a deep and profound sadness that I learned that my friend David Crosby has passed. I know people tend to focus on how volatile our relationship has been at times, but what has always mattered to David and me more than anything was the pure joy of the music we created together, the sound we discovered with one another, and the deep friendship we shared over all these many long years,” Nash wrote. “David was fearless in life and in music. He leaves behind a tremendous void as far as sheer personality and talent in this world. He spoke his mind, his heart, and his passion through his beautiful music and leaves an incredible legacy. These are the things that matter most. My heart is truly with his wife, Jan, his son, Django, and all of the people he has touched in this world.”
A source close to Crosby confirmed the musician’s death to Rolling Stone, but did not disclose a cause of death. Crosby was a member of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash, groups featuring his bright harmony singing that played a major role in the development of folk-rock, country-rock and the emergent “California sound” that dominated rock radio during the mid-Seventies.
Nash joined Crosby and Stephen Stills in the late 1960s, and the trio performed together for the first time at the L.A. home of Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas. Their self-titled 1969 debut was a hit, producing the classic single “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” about Judy Collins.
Adding Neil Young later that year, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young played their second gig at Woodstock, in front of nearly 500,000 people, announcing the arrival of one of rock’s first — and greatest — supergroups. CSN&Y’s debut album, Déjà Vu, sold 7 million copies and produced the hit singles “Woodstock,” “Teach Your Children” and “Our House.”
President Biden in Washington this month. It is unclear how involved he was in the disposition of documents before his 2017 departure from the White House. (photo: Doug Mills/NYT)
A team from the Justice Department conducted a 13-hour search of the president’s Wilmington residence on Friday.
Investigators for the Justice Department on Friday seized more than a half-dozen documents, some of them classified, at President Biden’s residence in Wilmington, Del., after conducting a 13-hour search of the home, the president’s personal lawyer said Saturday evening.
The remarkable search of a sitting president’s home by federal agents — at the invitation of Mr. Biden’s lawyers — dramatically escalated the legal and political situation for the president, the latest in a series of discoveries that has already led to a special counsel investigation.
During Friday’s search, six more items with classified markings — including some documents from his time as a senator and others from his time as vice president — were taken by investigators, along with surrounding materials, according to the statement from Bob Bauer, Mr. Biden’s attorney.
Mr. Bauer did not indicate what had prompted the search, saying only that the president’s lawyers had offered to provide access for a search “in the interest of moving the process forward as expeditiously as possible.” Justice Department investigators coordinated the search with Mr. Biden’s lawyers in advance, Mr. Bauer said, and the president’s personal and White House lawyers were present at the time.
“The F.B.I. on Friday executed a planned, consensual search of the president’s residence in Wilmington,” said Joseph D. Fitzpatrick, an assistant U.S. attorney in Illinois who is serving as a spokesman for the special counsel investigating the Biden documents case.
The search agreement with Mr. Biden’s legal team was negotiated by John R. Lausch, a federal prosecutor picked to lead the initial inquiry last year. His replacement, Robert K. Hur, who was appointed to serve as the permanent special counsel in the case earlier this month, is expected to take over “shortly,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said.
Mr. Bauer said the Justice Department had requested that the search not be made public before it was conducted, “in accordance with its standard procedures, and we agreed to cooperate.” He did not provide any more detail about the nature of the documents that were taken or what level of classification had been stamped on them.
The search underscored the seriousness of the investigation into Mr. Biden’s handling of documents and, while not a surprise raid, in some ways resembled the extensive search of former President Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida last summer, with agents looking for classified documents they believed were in Mr. Trump’s possession.
Mr. Biden and his aides have repeatedly argued that the two cases are very different because the president has cooperated fully with authorities, while Mr. Trump and his lawyers resisted efforts by the National Archives and the Justice Department to return documents.
Mr. Trump — who at one point claimed that he had declassified all the documents in question just by thinking about doing so — and his advisers are also under investigation for obstructing the inquiry into the classified information.
But since the discovery of Mr. Biden’s documents, Mr. Trump has complained that Justice Department investigators were treating his successor differently.
“When is the F.B.I. going to raid the many homes of Joe Biden, perhaps even the White House?” Mr. Trump wrote in a statement on his social media site earlier this month.
The results of Friday’s search follow a series of discoveries by the president’s own lawyers of classified documents at the president’s Wilmington home and the Washington office Mr. Biden used before moving into the White House. The lawyers quickly turned the documents over to the National Archives and, later, to the Justice Department.
Mr. Biden did not reveal the discovery of some of those documents for nearly two months, after initially finding them on Nov. 2. He has said that it would eventually be revealed that he did nothing wrong.
“There is no there there,” Mr. Biden told reporters on Thursday evening during a trip to California.
Regarding Friday’s search, Mr. Bauer said in his statement on Saturday: “Yesterday, D.O.J. completed a thorough search of all the materials in the president’s Wilmington home. It began at approximately 9:45 a.m. and concluded at around 10:30 p.m. and covered all working, living and storage spaces in the home.”
“D.O.J. had full access to the president’s home, including personally handwritten notes, files, papers, binders, memorabilia, to-do lists, schedules, and reminders going back decades,” he added, referring to the Justice Department.
Mr. Bauer did not make clear in his statement where in the Wilmington home the documents had been found. The previous classified documents were found in the home’s garage and in a nearby storage space.
Another statement, from Richard Sauber, a member of the White House Counsel’s Office, said that the search had been conducted and finished at the home on Friday, and neither the president nor Jill Biden, the first lady, was at the residence at the time.
On Friday evening, even as investigators were still going through his home, Mr. Biden traveled to Rehoboth Beach, where he owns another house, to spend the weekend there. The president’s lawyers have said they searched the Rehoboth Beach home earlier this month and found no relevant documents. Officials have not said whether Justice Department investigators plan to conduct another search of the property.
In his statement on Saturday, Mr. Bauer said that the president’s cooperation with investigators was evidence that Mr. Biden and the White House were acting in good faith.
“We have attempted to balance the importance of public transparency where appropriate with the established norms and limitations necessary to protect the investigation’s integrity,” he wrote. “We will continue to do so throughout the course of our cooperation with D.O.J.”
News of the lengthy search, and the discovery of more classified materials, is certain to provide new ammunition to the president’s critics, including Republican members of the House, who have already demanded information about the documents and their potential impact on national security.
In a letter to Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, this past week, Representative James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky, demanded that the president and his lawyers provide more information to Congress.
“It is troubling that classified documents have been improperly stored at the home of President Biden for at least six years, raising questions about who may have reviewed or had access to classified information,” Mr. Comer wrote.
On Saturday, after news of the latest discovery was reported, Mr. Comer tweeted: “Biden’s White House claimed all classified documents were turned over. Now the Justice Department found more. Is the scavenger hunt over? Americans need answers now.”
Mr. Comer, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has not demanded similar transparency from Mr. Trump regarding the classified documents found at his home.
Friday’s search underscored the unprecedented nature of the twin investigations being conducted by separate special counsels — one of the sitting president and one of his immediate predecessor — for improper handling of highly sensitive government documents.
A spokeswoman for Attorney General Merrick B. Garland declined to comment when asked if he had been consulted in advance about the search. She referred all questions to a spokesman for Mr. Hur, the special counsel.
Special counsels have broad autonomy to search locations associated with an investigation, or even seek search warrants, without seeking permission to undertake major investigative steps. Under departmental regulations, an attorney general could block a move, but only if the counsel’s behavior was “inappropriate” or grossly misguided.
Nonetheless, Mr. Garland would almost certainly have been informed about a consensual search through a departmental procedure known as an “urgent report” intended to keep leadership informed of the progress of the probe, said Mary McCord, a former top official in the Justice Department’s national security division.
“In this case, it seems that all along there has been an intent to cooperate with the investigation, that much is clear,” said Ms. McCord, a law professor at Georgetown’s law school. “What we still don’t have is an explanation of how this material, some of which dates back to his days in the Senate, ended up there.”
Mr. Biden’s possession of classified documents was first revealed to the public earlier this month, by CBS News.
Since then, the president’s aides have struggled to contend with a series of rolling disclosures of additional document discoveries and legal developments that have raised the scrutiny on Mr. Biden’s handling of the sensitive material.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, has been pressed repeatedly by reporters about the developing story during her daily press briefing. At one point, she told journalists that neither she nor her staff had been involved in discussions about what to tell the public and when.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stands next to a Leopard 2 main battle tank while visiting an army training center in Ostenholz, Germany, in October 2022. (photo: David Hecker/Getty Images)
Germany has been under growing pressure to provide Leopard tanks to Kyiv but says it has yet to make a decision.
Ukraine has said “global indecision” was “killing more of our people”, after Germany stalled on the decision whether to supply Ukraine with Leopard tanks to strengthen Kyiv’s fighting capacity against Russia.
“Today’s indecision is killing more of our people,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on Twitter on Saturday.
“Every day of delay is the death of Ukrainians. Think faster,” he said.
Some 50 countries agreed on Friday to supply Ukraine with billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware, including armoured vehicles and munitions to help Kyiv fight back against invading Russian forces.
Germany has been under considerable pressure to provide the tanks, but following the meeting, German defence minister Boris Pistorius said, “We still cannot say when a decision will be taken, and what the decision will be, when it comes to the Leopard tank.”
Afterword to global indecision… You'll help Ukraine with the necessary weapons anyway and realize that there is no other option to end the war except the defeat of🇷🇺 But today's indecision is killing more of our people. Every day of delay is the death of Ukrainians. Think faster
Ukraine has been pleading for German-made Leopard 2 tanks. Several allies echoed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in saying the tanks were essential to Ukraine’s fight with its much larger neighbour.
On Saturday, Latvian foreign minister Edgars Rinkevics tweeted a joint statement of the foreign ministers of the three Baltic states, urging Germany “to provide Leopard tanks to Ukraine now”.
“This is needed to stop Russian aggression, help Ukraine and restore peace in Europe quickly,” said a message tweeted by Rinkevics.
“Germany as the leading European power has special responsibility in this regard.”
We, 🇱🇻 🇪🇪 🇱🇹 Foreign Ministers, call on Germany to provide Leopard tanks to Ukraine now. This is needed to stop Russian aggression, help Ukraine and restore peace in Europe quickly. Germany as the leading European power has special responsibility in this regard.
Meanwhile in Berlin, hundreds of people demonstrated outside the Federal Chancellery building, urging Germany to send tanks to Ukraine.
Germany has been cautious about sending the tanks or giving permission to other nations to supply German-made tanks to Ukraine.
According to the reports earlier this week, Germany would agree to send Leopard 2 only if the United States would do so as well. However, Washington has indicated that t did not believe providing its Abrams tanks would be helpful due to difficulties in training and maintenance.
On Friday, around 50 US-led countries gathered at Ramstein Air Base in Germany for the Ukraine Contact group meeting. There were expectations before the meeting that Germany would at least agree to let other countries operating Leopards transfer them to Kyiv’s army.
US Senator Lindsey Graham, on a visit to Kyiv, called on both countries to supply the machines.
“To the Germans: Send tanks to Ukraine because they need them. It is in your own national interest that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin loses in Ukraine.”
“To the [US President Joe] Biden Administration: Send American tanks so that others will follow our lead,” he said.
The top US general underscored the substantial amount of equipment Ukraine was being pledged at Ramstein, including armoured vehicles, artillery and the large-scale training of its forces by allies.
“I do think it’s very possible for the Ukrainians to run a significant tactical or even operational-level offensive operation to liberate as much Ukrainian territory as possible,” US Joint Chiefs chairman General Mark Milley said.
But the Kremlin said on Friday that Western tanks would make little difference on the battlefield.
“One should not exaggerate the importance of such supplies in terms of the ability to change something,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
Moscow’s forces said they had carried out “offensive operations” in the region and claimed to have “taken more advantageous lines and positions”, according to the Russian defence ministry’s daily report.
Russia said it had also held a training exercise on repelling air attacks in the Moscow region, using an S-300 anti-aircraft missile system.
Ukraine’s defence ministry reported 26 air raids and 15 attacks from multiple-launch rocket systems Saturday.
“The enemy does not abandon its aggressive plans, focusing its main efforts on attempts to fully occupy the Donetsk region,” on Ukraine’s border with Russia, it said.
The list, which was discovered by a Swiss hacker, contains names and birth dates and over 1 million entries.
Acopy of the U.S. No Fly List has leaked after being stored on an unsecure server connected to a commercial airline. The No Fly List is an official list maintained by the U.S. government of people it has banned from traveling in or out of the United States on commercial flights.
As first reported by The Daily Dot, a Swiss hacker known as maia arson crimew discovered the list on an unsecured Jenkins server one night while poking around on Shodan, a search engine that lets people look through servers connected to the internet.
“Like so many other of my hacks this story starts with me being bored and browsing shodan (or well, technically zoomeye, Chinese shodan), looking for exposed jenkins servers that may contain some interesting goods,” crimew said in a blog about the leak. “At this point I've probably clicked through about 20 boring exposed servers with very little of any interest, when I suddenly start seeing some familiar words. ‘ACARS,’ lots of mentions of ‘crew’ and so on. Lots of words I've heard before, most likely while binge watching Mentour Pilot YouTube videos. Jackpot. An exposed jenkins server belonging to CommuteAir.”
On the server was a large amount of company data about CommuteAir, including the private information about its employees. There was also a file containing a copy of a 2019 edition of the No Fly List. The list includes names and birth dates and more than 1.5 million entries, but many of those entries are aliases that all reference the same person.“It’s so much bigger than I thought it’d be,” crimew told Motherboard.
“TSA is aware of a potential cybersecurity incident, and we are investigating in coordination with our federal partners,” a spokesperson for the TSA told Motherboard.
The United States has maintained a No Fly List for decades, but its number was much smaller in the days before 9/11 and only contained 16 people. After the attacks and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the list rapidly expanded. The exact number of people on the list is unknown, and the leaked data is a few years old and contains multiple entries for a single individual, but recent estimates put the total number at somewhere between 47,000 and 81,000 people.
“It’s a perverse outgrowth of the U.S. police and surveillance state,” crimew said. “Just a list with no due process…mostly just based on them being related to someone or being from the same village as someone. It’s so massive. I feel like this has no place anywhere. I feel like this doesn’t solve the problem.”
crimew told Motherboard they weren’t shocked to stumble on an unsecured copy of the No Fly List. “I’ve been digging into various jenkins [servers] for a while and there’s just so much to find,” they said. “It was just a matter of time until I found something like this.”
CommuteAir said the leak happened because of a misconfigured development server. “The researcher accessed files including an outdated 2019 version of the federal no-fly list that included first and last name and date of birth,” it said. “Additionally, through information found on the server the researcher discovered access to a database containing personal identifiable information of CommuteAir employees. Based on our initial investigation, no customer data was exposed. CommuteAir immediately took the affected server offline and started an investigation to determine the extent of data access. CommuteAir has reported the data exposure to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and also notified its employees.”
Climate activists (from left to right) Luisa Neubauer, Helena Gualinga, Vanessa Nakate and Greta Thunberg attend the World Economic Forum with their cease and desist letter to fossil fuel executives. (photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images)
An international quartet of prominent young climate activists attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week with a letter calling on fossil fuel CEOS to “cease and desist” any new oil, gas or coal developments.
The letter was penned by Greta Thunberg of Sweden, Helena Gualinga of Ecuador, Vanessa Nakate of Uganda and Luisa Neubauer of Germany and has so far been signed by nearly 950,000 people.
“This Cease and Desist Notice is to demand that you immediately stop opening any new oil, gas, or coal extraction sites, and stop blocking the clean energy transition we all so urgently need,” the letter begins.
The four activists met Thursday with International Energy Agency (IEA) head Fatih Birol during a side event at the World Economic Forum, as Reuters reported. While Thunberg spoke at the forum as an official delegate in 2019 — urging attendees to “safeguard the future living conditions for humankind” — this year she opted not to attend in an official capacity and instead leave that role to other climate activists.
“I think it should be people on the frontlines and not privileged people like me,” she said, as Reuters reported. “I don’t think the changes we need are very likely to come from the inside. They are more likely to come from the bottom up.”
Thunberg’s words came two days after she was briefly detained while protesting the sacrifice of the German village of Lützerath to an expanding coal mine. In their letter, Thunberg and the other three activists also emphasized the importance of grassroots action.
“If you fail to act immediately, be advised that citizens around the world will consider taking any and all legal action to hold you accountable. And we will keep protesting in the streets in huge numbers,” they warned fossil fuel executives.
Thunberg also had harsh words for elites gathered at Davos.
“We are right now in Davos where basically the people who are mostly fueling the destruction of the planet, the people who are at the very core of the climate crisis, the people who are investing in fossil fuels etcetera, etcetera and yet somehow these are the people that we seem to rely on solving our problems,” Thunberg said, as The Independent reported.
Nakate, meanwhile, detailed the experiences of some of those people on the frontlines, speaking of children suffering from malnutrition in the midst of an ongoing drought in the Horn of Africa, as The Guardian reported.
People living in vulnerable regions are “clinging to their lives and just trying to make it for another day, to make it for another week, to make it for another hour, another minute,” she said, as AP News reported.
Gualinga warned that the world is “taking a really dangerous path.”
Biroh, for his part, thanked the activists for meeting with him, but expressed more hope for the future, pointing to the passage in the U.S. of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as a boost for the development of renewable energy.
“We can have slight legitimate optimism,” he said, as Reuters reported. “Last year the amount of renewables coming to the market was record high,” he added.
The world needs a grand coalition of governments, industry & civil society who are genuinely committed to tackling climate change pic.twitter.com/HcAf6gUgug
Birol said that the energy transition would require the participation of a diverse group of stakeholders. However, the IEA calculated in 2021 that no new oil and gas projects should be developed past that year if world leaders wanted to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis. Birol also said that the current energy crisis does not justify investments in new oil fields. He also acknowledged the importance of speed in the energy transition, which is currently lagging behind necessity.
“[T]he problem is not being fast enough to reach our climate targets,” he said, as AP News reported.
The activists also reacted strongly to the appointment of Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), to preside over COP28 in the UAE.
“Lobbyists have been influencing these conferences since forever, and this just puts a very clear face to it… it’s completely ridiculous,” Thunberg said, as CNBC reported.
Neubauer agreed it was “ridiculous,” while Gualinga said it suggested world leaders were not serious about addressing the climate crisis, as The Guardian reported.
“I just think it sends a message of where we’re headed right now, if we’re putting the heads of fossil fuel companies to lead climate negotiations,” she said.
In response, a COP28 spokesperson defended the UAE’s choice, noting that al-Jaber founded a renewable energy firm called Masdar in 2006.
“Dr. Sultan is an energy expert and founder of one of the world’s leading rewnewable energy companies, a senior business leader, a government minister and a climate diplomat with over 20 years of experience of taking climate action,” the spokesperson said, as The Guardian reported.
However, in November ADNOC’s board decided to expand oil production by five million barrels a day by 2027 instead of 2030.
