In fact, the climate conference was rife with controversy and intrigue even before it began. Immediately after Al Jaber's appointment as president, climate activists decried his presidency as a conflict of interests and an outrage, with one activist complaining, "this appointment goes beyond putting the fox in charge of the henhouse." COP28 is the first conference to have an industry CEO, let alone an oil industry CEO, placed at the helm of the climate change mitigation agenda. Calls for Al Jaber to step down from his CEO position at Adnoc soon followed his appointment and were promptly ignored. The controversy only increased as the summit approached. A mere month before the conference began, in an online meeting of a She Changes Climate event, Al Jaber responded angrily to Mary Robinson?"an Irish politician, the chair of the Elders group, and a former UN special envoy for climate change?"after Robinson challenged Al Jaber to commit to phasing out fossil fuels entirely. Robi