As the opening date of this year’s COP29 climate meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan, approached, the guest list continued to thin. Heads of state from France, Germany, Canada, China, India, Brazil, Russia and the United States, among others, bowed out. King Charles excused himself. Greta Thunberg boycotted.
Their reasons varied, from head injuries to domestic troubles to principled stands against the host country’s human rights record, but taken together, the regrets struck an ominous tone. Coming at the end of what is going down as the hottest year on record, it was easy to feel that the annual meetings of signatories to the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), plus the circus of non-governmental organizations, lobbyists and negotiators that has grown up around them, have failed to deliver. Or, in the words of James Marape, president of Papua New Guinea, they’re now “a total waste of time.”
For the last 30 years, COP has been the planet’s main vehicle of hope for averting climate catastrophe. The third-ever COP, held in Japan in 1997, birthed the Kyoto Protocol, the pedestal for multilateral climate action. The landmark Paris Agreement was forged in the corridors of COP21 back in 2015. Now, a decade later, as global temperatures rise past the critical 1.5°C mark and the world’s most powerful country ushers in a climate-denying leader, COP’s mission has never been more urgent – while faith in its process hits ever new lows.
No one factor has undermined confidence in the COP process more than the influence that fossil fuel interests exert over it. Over time, the industry has become only more obstreperous – and less discreet; for COP29, host country Azerbaijan extended special guest passes to more than 132 global oil and gas executives and their staff. As former U.S. vice president Al Gore put it during the meeting, “The fossil fuel industry and the petrostates have seized control of the COP process to an unhealthy degree.” Now there are growing calls to wrest control back. The gazillion-dollar question: will it work?
Turning COP into a venue for greenwashing
Oil and gas did not show up to the COP party uninvited. Article 4 of its foundational document, the UNFCCC, affirms the need to “give full consideration” to the impact that mitigation measures will have on countries “whose economies are highly dependent on income generated from . . . fossil fuels” – lending legitimacy to the voice of oil and gas in climate negotiations. And from the outset, the industry positioned itself as essential to the transition to a cleaner future. Among the groups that attended the first COP meeting, in 1995 in Berlin, were the International Gas Association and the National Coal Association.
If they are going to be there only to be obstructors, and only to put spanners into the system, they should not be there. They could have an amazing impact on accelerating decarbonization, but they’ve decided not to do it.
– Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief
But in recent years, fossil fuel’s presence at COP has become more brazen. The last three meetings have been hosted by petrostates (Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan) and presided over by individuals who could hardly be considered dispassionate about oil and gas. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who was president of COP28, is also the chief executive of the U.A.E.’s state oil company; during the conference, he vehemently defended fossil fuels, claiming that phasing them out would “take the world back into caves.” At last year’s conference in Azerbaijan, President Ilham Aliyev called oil and gas “a gift of God” and said that countries like his – which derives more than 93% of its export revenue from fossil fuels and intends to boost gas production by a third over the next decade – “should not be blamed for having them.”
At the same time, the number of conference participants who represent the industry has surged. According to a report by the London-based NGO Global Witness, 503 fossil fuel lobbyists attended the COP26 meeting in Glasgow in 2021. The following year, at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, the number rose to 636. Last year, under mounting pressure from environmental organizations, the UNFCCC required all COP participants to disclose their affiliations, enabling the oil and gas presence to be better quantified. According to Kick Big Polluters Out, a coalition of 450 organizations working to protect the climate policy arena, 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists attended COP28 in Dubai and more than 1,770 attended COP29 in Baku: roughly 3% of all attendees in both cases.
In an open letter to UN leadership, published during COP29, a group of climate-policy heavyweights – including former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, former Irish president Mary Robinson and former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres – called for reform. Among their suggestions: that future COPs be hosted only by countries that have demonstrated a commitment to the Paris Agreement and that corporate players who are not aligned with the UN’s climate goals not be allowed to attend. They specifically cite the overrepresentation of fossil fuel lobbyists.
“They call into question the legitimacy of the entire conference,” says Harjeet Singh, a climate activist who has been attending COP meetings since 2008. “They are granted pavilions, they’re given official space for their greenwashing.”
Singh is global engagement director at the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, a campaign calling for an end to fossil fuel expansion and production. Launched in 2015 by a group of Pacific Island nations, the initiative now has the official support of 13 national governments and the European Parliament. But the headwinds blow strong at COP, where the number of delegates representing the world’s 10 most climate-vulnerable countries is routinely eclipsed by the number of those lobbying on behalf of oil and gas.
It’s not just lobbying. Briefing documents leaked to the BBC in the run-up to COP28 in Dubai revealed that the host country intended to use the forum to forge deals between the U.A.E.’s state oil company, ADNOC, and at least 27 countries in attendance. Likewise, Elnur Soltanov, chief executive of COP29, was caught in an undercover video using his position to promote investment in SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s national oil and gas company, and its gas-production expansion plans.
The perversion of this – akin to having arms dealers run peace talks – has cost even the most conciliatory voices their patience. For years, Figueres, who served as executive secretary of the UNFCCC from 2010 to 2016 and played a pivotal role in crafting the 2015 Paris Agreement, argued that fossil fuel companies belonged in climate policy negotiations. She’s changed her mind. “If they are going to be there only to be obstructors, and only to put spanners into the system, they should not be there,” she told an audience at the Columbia Journalism School in the run-up to COP28. “They could have an amazing impact on accelerating decarbonization, but they’ve decided not to do it.”
The behemoth task of changing UN policy
Figueres’s predecessor, Yvo de Boer, who helmed the UNFCCC from 2006 through 2010, sees it differently. He argues that the UN’s core principle of decision-making by consensus means that the interests of all parties to the convention – currently 198 countries – have to be respected, and that those interests are increasingly embedded in fossil fuels; the economies of a growing number of countries, particularly in Africa, depend on oil production. “When the Kyoto Protocol was adopted, it was just Saudi Arabia banging its fist in protest,” de Boer says on the phone from The Hague. “Now there are some 40 oil-producing countries in the room.”
De Boer believes that COP’s failures should be blamed less on fossil fuel meddling than on the unlevel playing field that skews the economy toward brown choices: fossil fuel subsidies in particular. Currently acting as an advisor to Aramco, the Saudi state-owned oil company, on its energy transition strategy, de Boer also believes that collaboration is preferable to alienation when it comes to the fossil fuel industry. “I think it was General MacArthur who said he’d rather have his enemies inside the tent, pissing out, than outside the tent, pissing in,” he says.
Many would prefer to see no pissing at all. Canadian climate activist Catherine Abreu is part of a movement pressuring the UNFCCC to adopt a conflict-of-interest policy that would bar fossil fuel interests from the UN climate meetings. In 2022, a group of constituencies made a joint submission to the UNFCCC secretariat, asking it to establish clear conflict-of-interest criteria and to apply them to conference applicants with an aim to “prevent entities with private, polluting interests from unduly influencing or undermining UNFCCC activities.” While no such accountability framework has been adopted, Abreu says the idea is gaining momentum and has been endorsed by the European commissioner for climate action.
RELATED
Who are the top PR firms greenwashing Big Oil at COP29?
New framework for CO2 offsets could create ‘cowboy carbon markets,’ critics warn
America’s far-right movement finds a warm welcome in Argentina
“Working on climate change, you’re operating in a world full of partial victories,” says Abreu, who works for the European Climate Foundation, an independent philanthropic initiative based in The Hague. “It’s a matter of putting all these smaller wins together.”
Preparing for her departure to Baku, Abreu points to two recent such wins: the UNFCCC’s insistence that lobbyists declare themselves as such when registering for COP, and the much-contested phrasing of COP28’s outcome document, which acknowledged the need to “transition away from fossil fuels.” What felt like a breakthrough at the time would be undermined at COP29, when Saudi Arabia vetoed any mention of fossil fuels in the meeting’s final agreement.
But Abreu maintains COP’s value. “It’s the only process that brings all countries together,” she says. “If we didn’t have this space, we’d have to create it. Is it perfect? No. We have to see what we can achieve through this process – and if it’s not functioning, how we can change it.”
Changing UN policy means turning a very big ship, as all parties have to be on board, but advocates of a conflict-of-interest mechanism point to the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Adopted in 2003, the convention was severely challenged by the aggressive lobbying tactics of the tobacco industry. In 2008, Article 5.3 was added, requiring all signatory states to keep tobacco companies and interests out of public-health policy discussions. Were a comparable instrument to be adopted by the UNFCCC, fossil fuel lobbyists would not be riding into COP meetings on the coattails of official delegations.
It sounds simple. “But what constitutes fossil fuel interests?” asks Jessica Green, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto who specializes in the politics of climate change. Strictly speaking, she says, the label would apply to many governments that are party to the UNFCCC. And they can’t just be kicked out; reiterating de Boer’s point, she emphasizes that the legitimacy of the UN system is premised on the participation – not exclusion – of member countries.
The stakes are high for COP30. The round number raises expectations, as does the host country, Brazil, where climate policy tensions are writ large. Home to both the world’s largest rainforest and its most extensive ultra-deep oil reserves, Brazil will provide a very different COP stage from its Middle Eastern predecessors, and a more complex cast of characters. It’s hard to imagine Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, a distinguished environmentalist, allowing fossil fuel interests to derail a climate summit in the middle of the Amazon forest she has fought most of her life to protect.
And Ana Toni, Brazil’s national secretary of climate change, who led the country’s delegation to COP29, has struck a defiant tone. “We were the first ones to say, ‘Let us stop deforestation,’” she said in an interview with Agence France-Presse at the meeting. “The same we’ll do with fossil fuels.”
If there was ever an opportunity to rein in fossil fuel influence, this would be it.
Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.
