The fossil-fuel industry has been revealed to have invested vast resources in lobbying EU institutions.
Colin Roche
Greta
Thunberg and her fellow school-strikers’ message is resonating across
the world—a world that is ready to hear it. Young people and their
allies are forcing those in power to face some uncomfortable truths
about political inaction in the face of a climate emergency. But a powerful opposition stands in their way, and it is the job of adults to confront it.
Part
of the reason climate action has been so weak is that the fossil-fuel
lobby has been successful in twisting and delaying it. We must prevent
this lobby putting its private interest in continuing to burn coal, gas
and oil ahead of the public interest in a liveable planet. A new
campaign plans to take on Europe’s fossil-fuel lobby.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the latest person to expose how the fossil-fuel industry has spent millions to deny and obfuscate
the reality of global heating—despite knowing the truth that its
businesses heat the planet and destroy communities. Simultaneously, it
has relentlessly attacked efforts to regulate carbon emissions or put
the world on a pathway of clean, renewable energy.
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The
most well-known case is the United States, where oil barons such as the
Koch brothers have funded candidates, parties and right-wing think
tanks to influence politics. They have had good bang for their buck,
with the Republican party (as well as some Democrats) almost entirely
captured by the oil industry, Trump proudly proclaiming a US pull-out of the Paris agreement, and environmental and climate-change regulations gutted.
Spending big
But
the influence of big oil, gas and coal on politics is not confined to
the US. With massive profits and a whole business model at stake,
fossil-fuel companies are spending big to overwhelm the public interest.
Since the 2015 agreement, the world’s five biggest publicly-traded oil
and gas companies (three of them headquartered in Europe) have spent more than $1billion on misleading branding and lobbying.
In
Brussels, the heart of European climate and energy decision-making, the
oil majors and their army of lobby groups maintain a constant
bombardment of decision-makers: meetings, advertisements, retreats and
sponsored events, to ensure their voice is heard first and most. Our research has found
that the big five and their fossil fuel-lobby groups employ 200
Brussels lobbyists, have spent €251 million on lobbying the EU since
2010 and met high level officials in the Juncker commission 327 times
(according to their self-declared figures and those of the commission).
Source: Friends of the Earth
Much
of this fossil-fuel influence is corporate capture in plain sight. In
Brussels, one can’t walk into a metro, read EU media online or surf
‘social media’ without being bombarded by the messages of fossil-fuel
companies. EU politicians appear at a continual stream of
industry-sponsored events, where lobbyists shape the narrative on energy
and climate and chat cosily with key decision-makers. In the UK, the
government has even held a cabinet meeting in the offices of Shell. But there are also shadier tactics—climate-denying think tanks,
for example, which refuse to declare the origin of their funding while
authoring papers suggesting climate change is exaggerated.
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There
is a constant moulding of European climate, energy and even foreign
policy, by those who have most to gain from slowing the transition. The
result is the commission’s obsession with supporting new pipelines and
infrastructure: 55 gas projects
were announced on the outgoing commission’s final day. These it says
are in the ‘common interest’, despite the evidence of the
incompatibility of gas and our climate goals.
The result is
climate goals that are far short of what’s needed to keep global warming
below 1.5C and Europe’s fair share of action. The result is energy
efficiency targets that are voluntary and ignored, with energy
consumption growing rather than falling. The result is renewable-energy
targets that barely stretch beyond the status quo trend.
Seriously weakened
The
influence is also evident in national capitals. In 2017 the then French
environment minister, Nicolas Hulot, announced a bill ‘to put an end to
hydrocarbons in France’ by phasing out the renewal of fossil-fuel
exploitation permits. After extensive lobbying and threats from the
private sector, the law was seriously weakened, such that it ended up
allowing exploitation permits to be renewed after the 2040 deadline.
When Hulot resigned a year later, he cited ‘the presence of lobby groups
in the circles of power’.
Meanwhile, the planet has continued to
heat, with already devastating consequences for people on every
continent and the most vulnerable communities hit hardest.
It is
time for the public interest to reassert itself, to ensure the vast
majority of the fossil-fuel industry’s gas, oil and coal reserves stay
in the ground. So now Friends of the Earth Europe has come together with
a number of other organisations, to seek a politics free of the
dangerous and overweening influence of fossil-fuel lobbyists on our
climate policy. This is their ‘tobacco’ moment.
Almost 200 civil society groups have backed a call for ‘fossil-free politics’—seeking
an end to the lobby’s endless access to decision-making, to conflicts
of interest and revolving doors, to preferential treatment such as
subsidies for fossil fuels and to ‘partnerships’ between governments and
those polluting the planet. As with the tobacco industry before it, for
our own health we must end the industry’s influence on public policy.
There’s no other way to ensure climate policy serves people, not profit.
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