U.S. and UAE sign strategic partnership deal to spur $100 billion in clean energy investment
Solar panels are set up in the solar farm at the University of California, Merced, in Merced, California, August 17, 2022.
Nathan Frandino | Reuters
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — The United States and United Arab Emirates on Tuesday announced the signing of a strategic partnership that will see $100 billion mobilized to develop 100 gigawatts of clean energy by 2035.
The deal, signed during the Adipec energy conference in Abu Dhabi, is entitled the “Partnership for Accelerating Clean Energy” (PACE) and encompasses four main pillars: the development of clean energy innovation and supply chains, managing carbon and methane emissions, nuclear energy, and industrial and transport decarbonization.
“The cooperation comes within the framework of the close friendship between the UAE and the United States of America” and “affirms the commitment of both sides to work to enhance energy security and advance progress in climate action,” according to a UAE government statement published by state news agency WAM.
The White House described the new partnership as a major achievement for President Joe Biden’s climate agenda.
“Today President Biden again demonstrated his deep commitment to ensuring a global clean energy future and long-term energy security as the United States and United Arab Emirates announced a robust partnership to ensure the swift and smooth transition toward clean energy and away from unabated fossil fuels,” the White House statement said.
The two countries will set up an “expert group” to “identify priority projects, remove potential hurdles, and measure PACE’s progress in achieving its goal of catalyzing $100 billion in financing, investment, and other support and deploying globally 100 gigawatts of clean energy,” it said.
The UAE is a major oil exporter but has invested heavily in developing non-fossil fuel energy sources, including building the world’s largest single-site solar power plant and the first nuclear power plant in the Arab world. It plans to host the COP 28 climate summit in 2023.
The ambitious plan from the two countries comes at a time of rising demand for, and shrinking supply of, oil globally as years of under-investment in fossil fuels and months of Russia’s war in Europe have brought on tightened supply and high prices for consumers.
At the same conference where PACE was signed into action, oil and gas company CEOs warned of the dangers of limiting fossil fuel production for the sake of climate change prevention.
Whereas recent years would have seen robust demands for more renewable energy investment and expediting the move away from hydrocarbons — a continued pillar of the Biden administration’s goals — more leaders are now stressing the need for revived oil and gas production ahead of what could be a very difficult winter for Europe, and other parts of the world facing shortages of those commodities. Oil and gas prices have seen multi-year, and in some cases, record highs over the last year amid supply issues and geopolitical conflict.
‘Maximum energy, minimum emissions’
Sultan Al Jaber, the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), said in a speech at the Adipec conference Monday that “energy is everybody’s top priority” today as “a perfect storm” hits the global energy landscape. He said that years of under-investment in oil and gas production has worsened the situation.
“If we zero out hydrocarbon investment, due to natural decline, we would lose 5 million barrels per day of oil each year from current supplies. This would make the shocks we have experienced this year feel like a minor tremor,” Al Jaber said, stressing the importance of energy security.
He emphasized the need for both traditional energy investment and carbon emissions reduction, arguing that they are not mutually exclusive and saying that “the world needs maximum energy, minimum emissions.”
“It is not oil and gas, or solar, not wind or nuclear, or hydrogen. It is oil and gas and solar, and wind and nuclear, and hydrogen,” Al Jaber said. “It is all of the above, plus the clean energies yet to be discovered, commercialized and deployed.”
Still, many policymakers and institutions forcefully decry the use of fossil fuels, warning the far bigger crisis is that of climate change. In June, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for abandoning fossil fuel finance, and called any new funding for exploration “delusional.”
Global economic forces don’t appear favorable to this aim, however. According to a recent report from UNCTAD, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, cross-border investment in climate change mitigation and adaptation is expected to fall this year amid a broader decline in investment projects.
And the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, on Monday raised its medium and long-term forecasts for crude demand, and said that $12.1 trillion of investment was required to meet it.
OPEC’s outlook still differs from that of some other bodies, like the International Energy Agency, which sees oil demand peaking sometime in the middle of the next decade, as nations continue the push to transition away from fossil fuels.
Environment
OpenAI leads private market surge as 7 tech startups reach combined $1.3 trillion valuation
Three years ago, Sam Altman lit the fuse for what’s become the most explosive bull run in the history of tech startups with the launch of ChatGPT.
Along with OpenAI’s rapid rise to a $500 billion valuation, other prominent names like SpaceX, Anthropic and Anduril have seen astronomical markups of late. In total, a basket of seven of the highest-valued private tech companies is now worth $1.3 trillion on paper, almost doubling in the past year, according to Forge Global, which provides a marketplace for private investments.
Forge’s value assessments are based on trading activity as well as funding round valuations and tender offers.
That number is continuing to grow. On Friday, CNBC’s David Faber reported that Elon Musk’s xAI is raising $10 billion at a $200 billion valuation, just months after achieving a $150 billion valuation.
Like in the public markets, where the artificial intelligence boom has dramatically lifted the market caps of Nvidia, Broadcom, Oracle and others, AI is also the dominant driver of private market valuations.
OpenAI leads the pack (Forge values it at $324 billion), followed by four-year-old Anthropic at $178 billion, with xAI at $90 billion, according to Forge. Those three companies are all competing directly with one another, as well as with Google and Meta, to create the large language models of the future.
Databricks, which is also one of Forge’s seven leading companies, is valued at $100 billion, due to the data analytics startup’s hefty investments in AI.
The other companies in the group are Musk’s SpaceX, fintech company Stripe and defense tech company Anduril, valued by Forge at $456 billion, $92 billion and $53 billion, respectively. AI is having such a big impact on defense and national security that Forge created a new defense fund to give institutions exposure to the sector.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (L) and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla.
Reuters
As as a group, they’ve quadrupled their value since late 2022, when ChatGPT first hit the market.
Forge CEO Kelly Rodriques said that the valuation surge is reflective of actual growth, not just projections.
“We’ve not seen this in the private market ever,” he said. “Companies that are growing at 100%, 200%, 300% on numbers that are already pretty big.”
The hunger for AI exposure is reshaping capital flows into AI, beyond just the few companies at the very top. According to Forge, 19 AI firms have raised $65 billion so far this year, accounting for 77% of all private-market capital.
With that kind of cash available, those companies have little incentive to going public, Rodrigues said.
“If these stocks are liquid and have access to as much capital as they can get, regulation is probably the only thing stopping them from staying private for as long as they want,” he said.
Even without being publicly traded, they’re having a significant impact on the public markets.
Oracle’s stock jumped 36% in a single day this month after the software maker’s earnings report, largely due to a massive contract with OpenAI. Broadcom also forged a new mammoth deal with the ChatGPT creator, while Microsoft continues to benefit from its substantial equity stake in the company.
Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta all recently raised capital spending guidance to reflect infrastructure demand.
OpenAI’s Altman sees some reasons for caution.
At a dinner with reporters in San Francisco last month, he described current valuations as “insane” and acknowledged that yes, “we are in a bubble.”
But he’s still betting big.
“You should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on datacenter construction,” he said. “We will spend maybe more aggressively than any company who’s ever spent on anything… because we just have this very deep belief in what we’re seeing.”
In July, the US Environmental Protection Agency proposed a plan to delete its scientific finding recognizing that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health, with the goal of making cars less efficient and more costly to fuel. That plan went up for public comment last month, and the public comment period closes in two days, on September 22.
At issue is the EPA’s “Endangerment Finding,” which is the scientific basis of EPA’s regulation of harmful greenhouse gases. The endangerment finding found that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health, recognizing a scientific fact that every serious person has known for a long time – but now it was at least codified into federal procedure.
The Endangerment Finding focused specifically on carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), sulfur hexaflouride (SF6), hydroflourocarbons (HFCs), nitrous oxide (N2O), and perfluourocarbons (PFCs, now more commonly known as PFAS or “forever chemicals”), all of which we are certain cause climate change and harm humans.
And, in fact, the EPA is required to regulate these pollutants by the Clean Air Act, which tells the EPA that it must work to reduce air pollution.
Lee Zeldin wants to poison you and raise your fuel costs
Despite that legal requirement, in July, Lee Zeldin, a fraudster placed into the position of chief saboteur of the EPA by a convicted felon who sought a billion-dollar bribe from the oil industry while running for an office he is Constitutionally barred from holding, announced that he would repeal this finding, flying in the face of law, science, public health and American economic interests.
Zeldin’s stated purpose for attempting to delete this finding is because if the finding is gone, it will allow him to roll back other life- and money-saving vehicle efficiency regulations. He wants to revert those regulations because they constrain the fossil fuel industry – which has given him hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes over his political career.
The specific regulations that Zeldin has his eyes on are automotive regulations put in place by the EPA under President Biden. According to the government’s own numbers, these regulations stand to save 2,000 lives per year and save Americans over $100 billion dollars per year in fuel and health costs.
In announcing his illegal plan to kill Americans and cost all of us more money, Zeldin was joined by Chris Wright, a former oil CEO who is currently the titular head of the Department of Energy. In April, Wright signed off on a DoE report which said the rollbacks sought by Zeldin would raise gas prices by 76 cents per gallon, showing that the people behind this plan know it will increase your costs and yet are shoving it down your throat anyway.
The reason gas prices would rise is because of higher demand. If vehicles are less efficient, not only will they burn more gasoline thus costing you more money and also causing more pollution, more dependency on foreign oil and higher health costs for everyone, but that gasoline will be more expensive because that’s what happens to prices of products when demand rises. And the proceeds from those higher gas prices aren’t going to anything societally beneficial, they’re rather going to line the pockets of oil elites.
Wright’s office also offered a junk report (which is wrong in 100 ways) to justify the EPA’s position, claiming wrongly that climate change isn’t all that bad. But in doing so, the DoE misinterprets data, which the author of one of the cited studies immediately pointed out that the DoE misinterpreted. So, even the stretched justifications offered for the plan are steeped in the ignorance we have come accustomed to since late January.
So far, this clearly harmful plan has only been proposed, and has been open for public comment on regulations.gov since early September, where interested members of the public can leave substantive comments on whether they support the planned regulatory change or not.
Since then, comments have been rolling in, though the docket only shows a total of 676 approved comments as of this writing. This seems exceptionally low, given that the original endangerment finding produced some 380,000 comments.
As it turns out, the EPA has actually received a total of 111,596 comments so far, but it has been approving those comments for public posting at a glacial pace. At the current rate, it will take some 30 years for the agency to sift through and approve all the comments.
We reached out to the EPA to ask what was taking so long, and it said that it was busy categorizing comments based on whether they were part of a mass comment campaign or written by individual commenters, and sorting through them for the presence of profanity (although, one wonders if profanity is really all that unjustified when it’s on a plan that will knowingly kill thousands of people per year). Many comments have been “deferred” after an initial scan, awaiting another look.
Regardless, the number of approved comments is still incredibly small compared to the total, and it’s hard not to wonder if something nefarious is happening here.
Looking through the few comments EPA has accepted, the vast majority seem to be in favor of the reasonable and both scientifically and legally correct position of maintaining the Endangerment Finding. If these are the comments that EPA deigned to allow through, even in the midst of its efforts to kill Americans, then we can imagine even more vehement opposition to its plan in the 110,920+ comments it has hidden (including this author’s… which was made as soon as the docket went up for comment, and much like this article, is forceful and truthful but not profane).
In addition to the public comment site, EPA also held a virtual public hearing, where interested members of the public could call in to make their voices heard. The vast majority of callers supported the scientifically correct position of maintaining the finding.
The comment period is also much shorter than usually expected for regulations like this, as pointed out by a comment made by the Attorneys General of several states. The comment period is likely smaller than legally required of the EPA, just another example of the EPA breaking the law to try to kill you. After this comment, EPA did extend the comment period… by one week, from September 15 to September 22. Which is still not as long as the legal requirement.
Public comments can be submitted here. In case you get lost, the docket code is EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0194.
If Zeldin pushes forward with his idea despite the inevitable public opposition to a plan to raise Americans’ costs and make their lives more deadly, the move will likely be caught up in courts for years, wasting Americans’ time and money and jeopardizing American competitiveness as the world rapidly moves towards improving vehicle efficiency without us.
Even if this clearly unwise and probably illegal move loses in court eventually, we still will have lost time in the transition – giving Zeldin’s oil masters some extra runway to sell their poison to us, and ensuring America’s competitors get a leg up in the transition to cleaner technologies while Americans remain forever poorer and sicker as a result of the republican party’s actions.
Public comments on this ridiculous plan are open through September 22 at 11:59PM EDT, 8:59PM PDT. Comments can be submitted here. In case you get lost, the docket code is EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0194. EPA has to respond to legitimate concerns made during public comment periods or else the rule could be voided, so the more substantive your comment, the better.
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