“As clean energy begins to challenge the dominance of oil and gas, what some industry barons and their allies fear most is being perceived – by investors, policy-makers, and the public – as entering a state of terminal decline,” independent journalist Jonathan Mingle writes in a guest essay for The New York Times. “If Kamala Harris wins the presidency, she could hasten the arrival of that moment by pursuing policies and regulations that would lead to lower consumption of oil and gas.”

But if Donald Trump prevails in the November 5 vote, “the industry is betting he will slam the brakes on the clean energy transition, prolong demand for oil and gas, and help maintain the primacy of fossil fuels for decades to come.”

If a Trump victory provides the opportunity, the industry will be ready, The Washington Post reports, citing internal documents produced by the 30-member American Exploration & Production Council (AXPC) and obtained by climate researchers at Fieldnotes.

“The lobbying blueprint takes particular aim at a new tax on emissions of methane, a gas that the International Energy Agency (IEA) says is responsible for nearly a third of human-caused global warming,” write journalists Evan Halper and Josh Dawsey for The Washington Post. “The policy plans, contained in documents distributed to a wide group of company executives at AXPC board meetings in April and August, also call for a repeal of more than a half-dozen executive orders that lie at the center of the Biden administration’s efforts to combat climate change.”

All in all, “the group’s goals amount to a monumental rollback of some of the most aggressive federal tools for cutting emissions,” along with measures “to unleash production and export of liquefied natural gas (LNG),” The Washington Post reports.

A ‘breathtakingly corrupt proposal’

AXPC says it will pursue the same policy agenda regardless of who wins the election. But “almost all the policies it targets for elimination and rewrite were enacted by the Biden administration,” Halper and Dawsey write. Trump, by contrast, “has called climate change a hoax and signaled a willingness to embrace the industry’s agenda by pledging favorable policies as he urged fossil fuel companies to donate heavily to his campaign.”

In The New York Times, Mingle has a rather more direct take on that extraordinary moment. “When Donald Trump invited about 20 prominent oil and gas executives to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago in April, he made a breathtakingly corrupt proposal: If they raised a billion dollars to help him retake the White House, he would roll back any policy they didn’t like when he took office,” Mingle recalls. “Several fossil fuel companies and their executives have since answered his call with brio, becoming among the top donors to the Trump campaign and Trump-aligned super PACs.”

At first glance, Mingle says, it isn’t clear why fossil companies would be so leery of a sitting government that allowed record domestic oil production over the last four years. “But if you take the long view, as these companies do, other policies of the Biden administration – which would probably be continued by a Harris administration – could pose a significant threat to their interests,” beginning with Biden’s late January pause on new LNG projects as an example. “The industry is wary of an administration that may make climate imperatives a permanent fixture in the public interest equation. That’s why reversing the pause was reportedly one of executives’ top requests of Mr. Trump at their Mar-a-Lago meeting. An attendee told the Washington Post that he promised to give it to them on his first day in office.”

Oil and gas interests are also pushing back on the International Energy Agency’s forecasts over the last year that global demand for all three fossil fuels will peak before the end of this decade, giving way to a new Age of Electricity. “Why such a fuss? Because when the energy data agency says the world’s appetite for oil and gas could soon enter a period of permanent decline, investors pay close attention. When the Dutch bank giant ING recently announced it would cease financing upstream development of new oil and gas fields immediately and liquefied natural gas export terminals after 2025, it pointed to IEA’s forecasts as justification.”

The ascent of renewables

While fossil companies join tech titan Elon Musk in trying to buy the election outcome they want, a new online dashboard published last week by the Environment America Research & Policy Center and California-based Frontier Group shows U.S. production of renewable electricity from solar, wind and geothermal tripling over the last decade.

“The growth of renewable energy in America has exceeded even the sunniest expectations,” Johanna Neumann, senior director the Policy Center’s Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy, said in a release. “When we replace fossil fuels with wind turbines and solar panels, and curb wasteful uses of energy, we build a world where the planet and people can thrive.”

The two organizations report:

• 15 U.S. states producing 30% or more of their electricity from renewables, up from only two in 2014, with Texas, California, Iowa, Oklahoma and Kansas (four Republican-voting states out of five) in the lead
• battery storage up 97-fold since 2014 and 72% since the end of 2022, at 15.5 gigawatts
• a 33-fold increase in solar in the southeastern U.S. over the last decade, delivering enough electricity to power 4.6 million average U.S. homes

“In 2024, with states like Texas, Oklahoma and Iowa leading the way, repowering America with clean energy is a fully nationwide project,” said Tony Dutzik, associate director and senior policy analyst at Frontier Group. “Solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and battery storage are benefitting people in all 50 states, providing the building blocks of a clean energy system free from dirty fossil fuels.”

As demand falls, so do gas prices

The post The oil and gas lobby is spending big to help Trump’s campaign appeared first on Corporate Knights.

It illustrates how far companies will go to influence elected officials. Politicians have elections to worry about, giving them a general motivation to avoid moves that will be unpopular. In fact, one survey found that congressional representatives rated “staying in touch with constituents” as the most important aspect of their jobs. But behind the scenes, there’s a very meta struggle to sway what politicians perceive as popular opinion.

“What really matters, in some ways, is not objectively what the public thinks, but it’s what decision-makers think the public thinks,” said Matto Mildenberger, a political science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Across the board, politicians tend to think climate action is much less popular than it really is. The latest example comes from a new study, published in the journal Nature Energy earlier this month, finding that local elected officials in Pennsylvania underestimated support among their constituents for large solar projects. Based on survey responses from nearly 900 residents and more than 200 policymakers, researchers found that Pennsylvanians liked solar projects 7 percentage points more than natural gas ones. Local officials, however, misperceived that preference, thinking natural gas, which is primarily composed of the potent greenhouse gas methane, would be more popular.

Since local officials have a lot of sway over what energy projects get approved, this misperception could translate to less clean energy projects getting built, slowing the transition away from fossil fuels. Pennsylvania has been identified as the state with the fifth-most solar capacity by 2050, according to Princeton’s modeling for how the country could reach net-zero emissions. “In the vast majority of the U.S., the actual ‘Is this project going to be built or not?’ is decided at the local level,” said Holly Caggiano, a co-author of the study and a professor of climate justice and environmental planning at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Misunderstanding what Americans believe about climate change could be slowing climate action at the national level, too. A study in 2019, co-authored by Mildenberger, showed that congressional staffers underestimated the popularity of putting restrictions on carbon emissions in their local districts. The same bias was true of elected officials at the state level, according to his research. “We should absolutely believe that those perceptions are limiting the ambition of climate and energy policy,” Mildenberger said. “It is one factor among many that makes solving the climate crisis harder.”

It’s not just politicians who hold a distorted view: People systematically underestimate public support for climate policies. A study from 2022 found that Americans imagined only a minority of their fellow citizens supported a carbon tax or a Green New Deal, when it was actually an overwhelming majority — meaning that actual support for climate policies was almost double what they thought.

Part of the problem is that people who support renewable energy or climate policies don’t usually talk about it much, giving everyone else a distorted impression about how popular, or unpopular, those beliefs really are. “Often, opponents to projects are very, very loud,” Caggiano said. In addition, media coverage may give unpopular opinions outsized weight in order to present “both sides” of an issue. While that practice has been fading in climate science coverage, it’s still common in articles about climate policy debates, Mildenberger said.

Some politicians have a more skewed view than others. Those who oppose climate action tend to be even further off in their estimates of what the public wants, because of a psychological bias that assumes most of their constituents share their opinions. But the information lawmakers are exposed to also affects the size of that perception gap — it widened when officials got more campaign contributions from fossil fuel interests, and when they reported having more contact with conservative interest groups, Mildenberger’s 2019 study shows. Those groups might push commissioned polls that make a climate policy look unpopular, for example, Mildenberger said.

“There’s this enormous effort by the industry to shape what politicians think the public wants,” Mildenberger said.

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• The backroom battle for Canada’s climate future

Pro-fossil fuel interests might also engage in “astroturfing,” a PR strategy that fakes grassroots support for a cause, like Entergy’s natural-gas-fired power station in New Orleans. The tactic has also been used in national debates. In 2009, when Congress was considering the Waxman-Markey bill that would enact a federal cap-and-trade program, a lobbying group for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity forged more than a dozen letters opposing it, supposedly from local community groups concerned about rising energy prices, and sent them to members of Congress. The bill passed the House by a slim margin but was never brought to a vote in the Senate.

There are accurate sources of information showing what Americans think about climate change, like nonpartisan polls from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which find that nearly three-quarters of Americans want to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Learning that the position they hold is unpopular with the electorate can even lead politicians to change their position on an issue, at least according to one study from Belgium.

More than a decade after the Waxman-Markey debacle, in 2022, Congress finally passed major climate legislation: The Inflation Reduction Act is investing hundreds of billions of dollars into clean energy, heat pumps, and other low-carbon technologies. Since there wasn’t significant public backlash to the law, it’s one data point that can help correct politicians’ misperceptions of public opinion, Mildenberger said. But he warns that fossil fuel interests are still very active in trying to block climate-friendly policies. “We should have every reason to expect that they’re going to keep on bringing more distorted information into the political arena to try and tilt that arena in their favor.”

This article was first published by Grist. Read the original article here. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. 

The post Politicians think climate policies are much less popular than they actually are appeared first on Corporate Knights.

While environmental groups zero in on animal agriculture as a top driver of climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss and ocean degradation, a growing number of consumers and governments have been demanding more from the sector to cut its carbon footprint.

However, most of the industry’s efforts so far appear to be focused on shifting messaging and undercutting climate policies rather than shifting practices.

Recent analysis by UK-based think tank InfluenceMap shows that the meat and dairy sector in the European Union is using much the same playbook used by Big Oil to chip away at climate policies. “The findings highlight that backsliding on climate and environmental policy in Europe cannot be explained solely by pressure from the farmers protests seen in recent months,” says the report, released in May. “In fact, years of the corporate meat and dairy sector’s strategic narrative building along with detailed policy engagement, both of which mirror fossil fuel industry tactics, have played a pivotal role.”

Researchers at InfluenceMap set out to understand the meat and dairy industry’s influence on the EU’s climate-related goals. They looked at 10 major corporations and five industry associations and how their advocacy affected six key EU policies aimed at tackling agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. The policies include a framework to transition Europeans to more sustainable diets and new rules around pollutants such as methane on European farms.

What they found was a concerted three-year campaign by the sector, aimed at subverting the EU’s efforts to reduce its environmental footprint and meet its net-zero targets. The strategic advocacy significantly influenced the trajectory of European policy-making around both the production and consumption of meat and dairy in the region, the authors found.

For example, the report notes, industry associations including the European Dairy Association, the European Livestock and Meat Trades Union, European Livestock Voice and others, were largely unsupportive of the EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy. The Farm to Fork strategy “should facilitate the shift towards sustainable diets, combining regulatory and non-regulatory initiatives necessary to secure a fair, healthy and environmentally friendly food system,” according to the report.

In fact, none of the industry associations analyzed for the report were shown to have engaged “positively” with those EU policies intended to help transition diets or reduce livestock emissions.

Industry associations also vigorously opposed these policies by using tactics reminiscent of fossil fuel lobbying, the report notes. “Both sectors employ similar misleading narratives through strategic public messaging to sow doubt and undermine the need to tackle GHG emissions from the meat and dairy sector.”

In particular, researchers highlighted two narratives: “emphasizing the importance of livestock for society; and distancing livestock from being viewed as a driver of climate change.” And it worked, according to the report, thanks to intense corporate lobbying from 2020 to 2023, with one-third of the examined policies significantly weakened and half of them stalled. Some of the key initiatives affected by these efforts include the Sustainable Food Systems Framework and revisions to the Industrial Emissions Directive, which regulates farm pollutants.

There was, however, a clear divide among companies (as opposed to industry associations). Consumer goods giants like Unilever and Nestlé showed more cooperative stances on the policies compared to meat and dairy producers such as Arla and Danish Crown. On Arla’s corporate website in May 2023, for example, “the company seemed to oppose the need for the transition of diets recommended by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], suggesting that consumers become ‘confused’ regarding sustainable diets which leads them to deselect dairy products.”

Moreover, the meat and dairy industry’s advocacy also influenced political discourse, notably within the centre-right European People’s Party (the EPP, the largest party in the European Parliament, is European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s party), shaping its opposition to policies affecting dietary transitions and agricultural emissions reduction. By aligning with industry narratives, the EPP’s stance during 2022 and 2023 mirrored the interests of meat and dairy producers and their lobbying bodies, setting a tone for potential shifts in policy ahead of the 2024 EU elections.

InfluenceMap’s findings expose a sophisticated campaign by the meat and dairy sector to weaken EU climate policies.

“Following obstructive behavior from the industry, and the infiltration of industry narratives in the EU Parliament and EU Commission, policies that are fundamental to reducing GHG emissions in line with scientific advice have been significantly weakened or have stalled,” Venetia Roxburgh, EU program lead at InfluenceMap, said in a statement. “Without science-based policies tackling the sector, it does not seem likely that European agricultural GHG emissions will reduce in line with 1.5°C.”

Much like similar efforts made by these industries in North America, these tactics have reshaped the landscape of European environmental regulation, delaying and diluting crucial measures meant to help mitigate animal agriculture’s well-documented impact on climate and the environment.

The post Here’s how the meat and dairy lobby is watering down climate policy in Europe appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In recent years, some of the group’s largest members – including Microsoft, Ford, Meta, even Shell – have publicly challenged the trade organization’s advocacy around climate change. Ever since the chamber successfully lobbied to torpedo the biggest piece of climate legislation to reach Congress – the Build Back Better Act – in 2022, more and more members have indicated that if the organization doesn’t change its tune, they’ll be cutting ties.

This isn’t just a U.S. phenomenon. Climate-forward corporations the world over are starting to raise their voices against trade groups that actively undermine climate policy. In 2022, Swedish car-maker Volvo dropped out of the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association after the group refused to lobby for a more ambitious phase-out of fossil fuel cars than the European Union’s 2035 deadline. Last March, Unilever publicly announced that it was reviewing its membership in 27 trade associations whose climate lobbying appeared to be misaligned with its own. The consumer products giant said it would be exiting any associations unwilling to become “catalysts for positive policy change,” as chief sustainability officer Rebecca Marmot put it.

But according to a recent report by U.K.-based think tank InfluenceMap, corporate Canada is holding its tongue. Despite the outsized influence of the fossil fuel industry on Canada’s cross-sector trade associations, none of their members seem willing to speak up. Yet.

“The misalignment here is clear,” says Kendra Haven, director of projects at InfluenceMap, referring to the difference between the climate lobbying activities of trade associations like the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Business Council of Canada, and Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters and the positions of their members. “But so far, nobody has stepped forward.”

InfluenceMap’s work is premised on the belief that climate action will happen only in collaboration between business and government and that it’s critical to understand how the two interact – specifically, how the private sector influences public opinion and policy. To this end, the British think tank takes companies and trade associations under the lens to examine all facets of their “climate engagement”: the messaging conveyed in their social media and public relations campaigns, the research they sponsor, the contact they maintain with regulators and elected officials, and the campaigns and political parties they fund. Some of this activity is visible to the public eye, but much of it is not.

By shining a spotlight on corporate influence, InfluenceMap hopes to create awareness among investors and the broader public, and ultimately to push the private sector to align itself with climate science. Sunshine, it is said, is the best of disinfectants.

For its Canada platform, which launched in May, InfluenceMap looked at the climate engagement of 45 of the country’s highest-emitting companies as well as nine of its most influential trade associations. It found that none have policy engagement that is considered “science-aligned” – or consistent with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global temperature rise to well below 2°C. Of the 45 companies, drawn from across Canada’s economy, 12 were found to be “partially aligned”; the rest were either completely misaligned or impossible to assess because of the opacity of their engagement activities. Just six companies – all in the oil and gas sector – were seen to be actively engaged in advocacy: all pushing for the expansion and ongoing subsidization of fossil fuels.

“Ninety percent of the world has set a net-zero target. We should see so much more lobbying towards that,” said former environment minister Catherine McKenna, now chair of the UN’s High-Level Expert Group on the Net Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Entities, at the InfluenceMap launch, hosted by Corporate Knights.

It comes as no surprise that the most vehement lobbying bodies in Canada are the trade associations representing fossil fuels. In the cacophony of climate lobbying, the Canadian Fuels Association, the Pathways Alliance, the Canadian Gas Association and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers are yelling the loudest by far, railing against the three key climate policies on the federal government’s agenda: the proposed oil and gas emissions cap, the methane-reduction regulations for the oil and gas sector, and the emissions performance standard for electricity generation.

They’re also yelling in sync, drilling home the same message: that the world needs Canada’s “responsibly produced” energy; that Canada, as one of the “cleanest” producers of natural gas, should grow its market share; that liquefied natural gas (LNG) will displace coal in emerging countries; that Canadian oil and gas is vital to global energy security.

Ninety percent of the world has set a net-zero target. We should see so much more lobbying towards that.

 

-Catherine McKenna, former environment minister

What is more surprising is the extent to which oil and gas interests are colouring cross-sector trade associations. In recent years, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Business Council of Canada, and Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters may have voiced support for Canada’s 2050 net-zero goal, but they’re also lobbying Ottawa to, variously, drop the oil and gas emissions cap, expand the country’s LNG infrastructure and increase Canadian exports of oil and fossil gas.

InfluenceMap, which slapped all three groups with Ds in its report, points out that the fossil-fuel-friendly positions of these associations misrepresent their memberships, which, on average, engage more positively on climate issues. “Trade associations tend to protect the members that have the most to lose,” Haven says. “It’s the lowest-common-denominator effect.”

Neither the Canadian Chamber of Commerce nor the Business Council of Canada provided comment on InfluenceMap’s findings.

Oil companies like Shell, Suncor, Cenovus and ConocoPhillips are all paying dues to the Business Council of Canada, which has repeatedly lobbied Ottawa to drop the oil and gas emissions cap and opposed the clean fuel regulations. Corporate leaders such as BCE (Bell Canada Enterprises), Rogers, Telus, Desjardins, Sun Life, HP Canada, Microsoft Canada – all of which have publicly committed to be net-zero by 2050 – are also members of the council. InfluenceMap is hoping more companies will use their membership clout to encourage their business associations to speak up more consistently in favour of progressive climate policies.

“More than ever, we’re seeing how entrenched oil and gas are in the trade associations,” McKenna said. But, she added, trade groups are “driven by their membership. Companies should see this is an opportunity for them to get what they need.”

Coro Strandberg, a B.C.-based corporate sustainability consultant and co-founder of the Canadian Purpose Economy Project, points out that divorcing trade associations is not the only way to effect change. Widening the aperture beyond the 45 companies that formed the basis of InfluenceMap’s analysis, Strandberg sees positive developments in the trade associations of several sectors of the Canadian economy, including steel, cement, forestry, dairy and chemicals. She doesn’t buy the notion that associations are beholden to the laggards. “The dynamic in trade associations is that they serve their members,” she says. “They wait for members to demand that they move forward on climate.”

The dynamic in trade associations is that they serve their members. They wait for members to demand that they move forward on climate.

 

–Coro Strandberg, co-founder Canadian Purpose Economy Project

This can happen remarkably quickly, as evidenced by a recent turnaround at the Cement Association of Canada (CAC). Cement, which is produced through the decarbonization of limestone, is responsible for some 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. During the pandemic, the Canadian cement industry noticed a drop in its market performance as investors became more concerned about the potential impact of carbon pricing. “Everyone knew that cement had a huge CO2 footprint,” says David Redfern, CEO of Lafarge Canada’s Eastern Canada division. “But few were concerned until it started to impact our stock price.”

In response, the CAC shifted its focus. Bringing more sustainability and government relations experts on board, the organization began to proactively engage with government. In partnership with Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, the CAC developed a roadmap to net-zero for the cement industry. Redfern emphasizes that the roadmap, which was published in 2022, is not a fixed thing, but a dynamic process in which government, producers and end users will all play a role. “We want to change the rules so that the sustainable choice will also be the profitable choice,” he says.

As inspiring as the cement industry case is, it is also somewhat unique. The CAC has a relatively small and coherent membership; Redfern describes them as five like-minded multinationals. Most importantly, the cement industry knows it has a solid future. The same can’t be said of the fossil fuel industry. Its exorbitant public relations campaigns and manic lobbying efforts are seen by many as the desperate measures of a sector that’s fighting for its life. The problem is, they seem to be working.

“All of Canada’s climate policies have been heavily distorted by the oil and gas industry,” says Adam Scott, who directs Shift, an initiative that steers pension funds toward sustainable investments. Scott is watching in dismay as Ottawa considers yielding to the fossil fuel industry’s relentless pressure to adopt a “Made in Canada” taxonomy for sustainable investment – one that will likely be more forgiving of fossil gas such as LNG than its European counterpart – and to water down sustainable-finance reporting standards in this country.

“Oil and gas is backed into a corner,” Scott says. “It knows it can’t block climate policies forever, but it can slow them down. And it is.”

Kendra Haven expects that as more companies are added to InfluenceMap’s Canada platform, she will find some that are more positively engaged on the climate. She hopes that they – and Canadian companies across the board – will stop ceding the floor to oil and gas. As Dylan Tanner, the founder of InfluenceMap, puts it, climate change is ultimately a function of physics and chemistry. The sooner that the corporate world aligns itself with science, the sooner it can take advantage of the vast opportunities the green economy offers – and help mitigate climate disaster.

The post The backroom battle for Canada’s climate future appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The picture shifted when they were asked about risks over a 10-year horizon; climate change then loomed as the greatest threat. The reality is that the short- and long-term threats identified in the report are all related.  

The worsening climate crisis requires strong policy action by governments that in turn are acting in an environment in which misinformation is clouding clear consensus from the scientific community on climate. Misleading, strategic communications in this sphere are part of a wider program, spearheaded by the fossil fuel value chain – including some of the largest representatives of the gas and oil companies worldwide – to delay government action. Despite this, non-fossil-fuel companies are beginning to raise their voices in recognition that government action is needed to develop greener business models. But, to make more progress,​​ we need to have a clear understanding of the tactics that ​make the fossil fuel sector so successful in holding back action on climate policy.  

Last year, ​InfluenceMap ​​uncovered revealing ​strategy documents that have since been removed from the website of the International Gas Union ​(​IGU), which describe themselves as the spokesperson for the gas industry worldwide, representing 150-plus groups and 90% of the global gas market.  

The documents stated that climate represents an “existential threat to the gas value chain” and went on to describe the IGU’s two-pronged approach. First, to focus their narrative efforts on dispelling concerns about gas as a fossil fuel, separate from coal and oil, while defending and enhancing the role of gas. Second, they would concentrate their considerable lobbying efforts to delay or stop any climate-related government policy that would have a negative impact on the gas business. They made it clear that they intend to achieve these goals by using their considerable resources to tap into a sophisticated communications network that seeks to influence key thought leaders and to exploit social and other media to “promote positive sentiment toward, and broaden the definition of gas.”  

The IGU laid out a list of priority targets, including financial institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian, African and Islamic development banks; the UN climate summit (COP) process; non-governmental organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Rocky Mountain Institute; and think tanks and data providers such as McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group.  

InfluenceMap data shows how the IGU’s 150-plus members, including oil majors and national-level gas industry associations, have implemented this strategy globally. In Europe, communications strategies appear to focus on the “greening of gas,” in which “fossil gas” is presented as part of a broader category of “gases” that includes “low-carbon” and “decarbonized” gas. In Africa, parts of Asia and South America, communications focus on the issues of energy poverty and air pollution and how gas can solve them.  

The IGU and the wider fossil fuel sector has been successful at delaying climate action using these tactics for three reasons.  

First, they are collaborative. They are willing to sideline the competitive issues they have, and they lobby and communicate collectively, using one strategy and voice.  

Second, the fossil fuel industry sees climate as an existential threat not so much to the planet as to its sector, and therefore, it’s sharply focused on its goal of stopping any government policy that would adversely affect its business.   

Finally, the sector has built considerable institutional infrastructure around climate-policy influencing over the last few decades, targeting the capture of organizations noted in the IGU list and also co-opting cross-sector business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. This is in addition to their own powerful industry groups, like the American Petroleum Institute.  

Funding is not necessarily the key to these successes. Clearly, larger fortunes exist elsewhere – in tech, finance and beyond. But this funding is not being deployed collaboratively, or with the razor-sharp focus on influencing policy that is required. In addition, climate-policy advocates are starting from behind, as the fossil fuel’s lobbying infrastructure has been years in the making and is both expensive and difficult to replicate quickly. 

However, things are changing fast. There is reason to believe we are seeing the beginning of the end of fossil fuel dominance over governments’ climate agendas globally. Non-fossil-fuel companies are waking up to the need for governments to act on climate. The rest of the corporate sector, which has made strong climate commitments, has a key ally – that is, the scientific consensus around climate solutions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is getting ever more specific about the role of  renewables and electric vehicles in society, as well as climate solutions like carbon capture.  

The consensus is clear. Fossil fuels need to be phased out and renewables scaled up. The positive corporate climate movement needs to be more collaborative and more strategic, using science-based narratives to its advantage. Armed with the truth, focused and collaborating effectively, the businesses of the future can prevail.  

Dylan Tanner is the executive director of InfluenceMap, an independent climate think tank. 

The post The backroom corporate battle for science-based climate policy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But far greater than the irony of Weihl’s voicelessness is the symbolism of his determination to be heard. Possessed of the urgency of the climate crisis, Weihl is using all the means at his disposal to continue to broadcast his message: that Big Tech needs to step out of the shadows, take a decisive stance on the climate crisis and put its full financial and political weight behind climate policy and action.

“Tech companies are viewed as forward looking,” Weihl types into the chat function of our Zoom conversation. “They have enormous influence. And they’re innovators. We need innovation at this point.”

Weihl knows the tech industry from the inside. He spent the first decade of his career as a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before shifting into the tech sector to land the position of “green energy czar” at Google in 2006 and later acting as director of sustainability for Facebook. He acknowledges the significant efforts these companies were making to mitigate climate change: buying billions of dollars of clean energy to power their operations, maintaining venture investment funds for cleantech start-ups, investing heavily in the research and development of decarbonization technologies. And yet, as the climate clock ticked on, Weihl could also see that the sector wasn’t doing enough.

“We were winning, but we weren’t winning fast enough, and with climate, winning slowly is the same as losing,” he said in a 2020 TED Talk. The same year, he founded ClimateVoice.

Inspiration for the project stemmed in part from what Weihl had observed in 2015/2016, as the American corporate world mobilized around LGBTQ2S+ rights. Companies like Apple, Walmart and the National Basketball Association threatened to pull out of states that were considering, or passing, regressive sexual- and gender-rights legislation. Weihl watched business affect social policy, and it got him thinking.

Most companies talk about how urgent climate is. And how committed they are to it. But when doing something on climate conflicts with or risks their core business, the profit concerns win.

He knew that the tech industry – with its forward-looking leaders, focus on innovation and massive influence on culture and politics – had a major role to play in climate action. But he also realized that despite the progress made – the innovations and cost reductions in renewable technologies and investments in green energy – the tech sector was failing to exploit its biggest lever: its potential to influence public policy.

Rather than stand up to the fossil fuel industry, as they were uniquely positioned to do, he saw tech companies playing at best a passive, and at worst an obstructive, role.

To illustrate this point, Weihl cites the fact that only one of the U.S.’s five Big Tech companies – Microsoft – was prepared to endorse last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. Containing a US$369-billion investment in climate-related programs, the IRA represented the most significant single step the U.S. Congress has ever taken to tackle climate change. Only after it passed into law, in August 2022, did Google let out a quiet cheer – in a tweet from its chief sustainability officer.

“Most companies talk about how urgent climate is,” Weihl types. “And how committed they are to it. But when doing something on climate conflicts with or risks their core business, the profit concerns win.” He says that tech companies are deeply compromised by their memberships in trade associations that consistently oppose climate bills, chief among them the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which bristles at any mention of corporate tax hikes.

The tech sector’s hypocrisy on climate plays out in many ways. Earlier this year, Amazon effectively killed a bill put forward in the Oregon legislature that would have impelled large data centres and crypto miners in the state to use only clean energy by 2040. Data centres are big business in Oregon, many of them owned by Seattle-based Amazon, and they require vast amounts of power – equivalent to a small city – to cool their armies of computers. The Oregon utility that serves Amazon has long since exhausted its renewable supply and been forced to buy fossil-fuel-backed electricity; its emissions per kilowatt hour have increased 543% since 2010.

Young employees want to see climate action. And recruitment and retention are big pain points, so companies have to pay attention to employee sentiment on this.

Amazon takes every opportunity to tout its Climate Pledge, a commitment to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040; the arena it built in 2021 for Seattle’s new NHL franchise is named Climate Pledge Arena and aspires to become the first net-zero-certified arena in the world. At the same time, Amazon was willing to lobby hard – and successfully – to ensure that that clean energy bill died on the floor this spring, claiming that Oregon’s transmission lines and energy infrastructure wouldn’t support the switch.

Weihl says that this kind of duplicity doesn’t wash well with the tech sector workforce and that ClimateVoice is working hard to harness its frustration. “Young employees want to see climate action,” he types. “And recruitment and retention are big pain points, so companies have to pay attention to employee sentiment on this.”

ClimateVoice engages with tech workers, informing them of what their employers are doing on the climate front – both in and out of public view. Weihl says that when he launched his non-profit, most workers were oblivious to their companies’ lobbying activities and trade association involvement, but the more they learned, the more inclined they were to advocate. In the fall of 2021, he was pleased to see a loud chorus of tech workers speak out in support of the Build Back Better Act and again last summer in favour of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Weihl believes that this is how to foment change – from below. “In my experience, it’s very hard to persuade management on purely moral grounds, or on what’s best for society,” he types. “But if the workforce is clamouring for something, that makes it a near-term operational issue.”

In Weihl’s estimation, the tech industry has already developed some 80% of the technological solutions required to help mitigate the climate crisis. Now it has to deploy them faster, innovate further and, most importantly, speak louder and with one voice.

The post Meet the man calling out Big Tech’s climate hypocrisy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

That’s the main message behind a new campaign by Canadian advocacy group Environmental Defence that “names and shames” a cast of seven corporate individuals it says are most to blame for the lack of climate action on the fossil fuel front. 

Abstract terms like “oil and gas sector” obfuscate responsibility. “We want to point fingers where fingers deserve to be pointed,” says Julia Levin, associate director of national climate at Environmental Defence. “It’s no accident that in Canada, climate policy after climate policy gets weakened, delayed or killed. It’s because of the actions of a small number of people who are putting their profits ahead of Canadians and the rest of the planet.”  

Earlier this month, Environmental Defence launched its “Canada’s climate villains” campaign, using graphic-novelesque illustrations and monikers like “Toxic Traitor” and “Ruthless Greenwasher.” It’s a tactic that, Levin notes, is less common in “so-called polite Canadian society” – and is designed precisely to cut through the noise.  

“We know that a backgrounder with all that information won’t get read,” she says.  

The list of seven people includes Dave McKay, the head of RBC, the biggest oil and gas lender in the world (nearly $350 –billion since 2015, according to Environmental Defence) and the subject of a greenwashing investigation by the Competition Bureau of Canada; Susannah Pierce, the CEO of Shell Canada, who has been called out for greenwashing; and Brad Corson, the head of Imperial Oil, a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil. Imperial is currently under investigation by the federal government for a toxic leak from an oil sands mine in northern Alberta that leached industrial wastewater into muskeg, forest and waterways used by First Nations for nine months before the public was notified.  

Rounding out the list are Michael Binnion, who heads up the Modern Miracle Network, an oil advocacy organization; Alex Pourbaix, whom Environmental Defence labels as “the big oil spin doctor” at the helm of Cenovus, one of the largest oil sands companies in the country; Arthur Irving, a billionaire who leads New Brunswick’s Irving Oil, the largest oil refinery in Canada; and Lisa Baiton, CEO of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the biggest Canadian oil sands lobby group which promotes the notion of “ethical oil.” 

Canada has pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, alongside 120 other countries. Last year, it committed to cut emissions by 40 to 45% below 2005 levels by 2030. It’s counting on the oil and gas sector – which represents 26% of all emissions in the country – to shave its emissions by 31% below 2005 levels by 2030 while at the same time forecasting oil production to rise by 22% between 2020 and 2030.  

“We committed to the [oil and gas] sector that we would work with them in a collaborative basis to establish the cap,” Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said last March, ahead of public consultations on the matter.  

But environmental activists have warned that the government’s numbers do not add up. Climate Action Tracker, a research group that follows the progress made by the countries that generate about 85% of global emissions, considers the climate policies Canada has drafted thus far to be “highly insufficient.” While it notes that emissions are “starting to trend downwards,” the government has yet to specify how exactly it will hit net-zero in the given time frame.  

“Under all scenarios, Canada is still producing and exporting oil and gas in 2050,” Climate Action Tracker states.  

Environmental Defence says it’s a mistake to believe that oil and gas companies can be part of a green transition. In Canada, as Corporate Knights has previously reported, they pay among the lowest average carbon costs of any sector. “It was British Petroleum that invented the idea of a carbon footprint in a really obvious effort to get people to focus on the small things that they can do – which are important but which are vastly outweighed by the impact of these individuals and their companies,” says Levin.  

Environmental Defence’s campaign focuses on corporate actors, not politicians, “because we’re a charity and have to be non-partisan.” Beyond following the money trail and identifying the biggest players in the industry, it zeroed in on misinformation and a narrative fostered by some quarters that equates being anti-oil with being anti-Canada, using so-called astroturf groups that “pretend to be people-driven movements but are really funded by the fossil fuel industry” as tools to disseminate their message. Environmental Defence named Binnion, an Alberta accountant turned energy entrepreneur, as a key player in the “petro populism movement.” Once described by former Quebec premier Jean Charest as “the kind of person who moves the dial,” Binnion has fought tooth and nail against the carbon tax, branding it as a “green paradox” in a quest to bring down the Trudeau Liberals. The Modern Miracle Network funded New Brunswick Proud, a group affiliated with a conservative network that pushed out anti-Liberal and pro-oil messaging through memes and other social media content around the 2019 federal election. 

Levin says the goal of the climate-villain campaign is to help people understand the ways in which the oil and gas sector operates, and the influence it wields, so that they can go back to their communities and “create more political space for ambitious climate action.” 

The post How these oil and gas players are undermining climate action in Canada appeared first on Corporate Knights.

U.K.-based InfluenceMap – which is funded by major foundations in Europe and the United States – analyzed the climate policy engagement of the six largest oil and pipeline companies headquartered in Canada, as well as the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP). It scored them on three key issues: whether they advocate for fossil fuel expansion; whether they advocate for increased subsidies; and whether they oppose emissions regulations.

“Despite the Canadian oil and gas sector’s widespread use of net zero commitments and narratives, the industry remains strategically opposed to science-based policy to deliver net zero targets in line with limiting warming to 1.5°C,” the report said.

The InfluenceMap report builds on the work of an expert panel established by United Nations Secretary General António Guterres and chaired by former federal environment minister Catherine McKenna. The expert panel report said companies’ net-zero commitments are credible only if they support effective climate regulations in their lobbying and other policy engagement.

McKenna echoes the InfluenceMap criticism of Canadian oil and pipeline companies.

They “continue to advertise that they’re committed to net zero while lobbying against the climate action needed to make this goal possible,” she told Corporate Knights. McKenna stressed that companies are failing to significantly invest in the technology solutions that they espouse, despite their record profits in 2022. Meanwhile, they’re hiking dividends and share buybacks.

Pathways Alliance, which represents the largest oil sands producers, has laid out a plan that it says will cut emissions by 20 megatonnes by 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions in its operations by 2050.

The group has launched a major advertising campaign touting its climate plan, including frequent television spots. However, McKenna argues that it cannot be taken seriously until the companies allocate major capital spending to it and align their executives’ compensation to provide incentives for environmental improvement. Suncor, which InfluenceMap ranked as a leader among Canadian companies, recently announced it has appointed as its new chief executive Rich Kruger, former CEO at Imperial Oil Ltd., which received the lowest marks in InfluenceMap’s ratings.

In a pre-budget submission to the Commons finance committee released in October, CAPP said it supports “the Government of Canada’s desire to create a path for meeting its international climate change objectives.” It criticized specific measures – such as the proposed cap on oil and gas emissions – as unworkable and uneconomic.

However, the InfluenceMap analysts conclude those commitments lack credibility. “The Canadian oil and gas sector is generally positioned against ambitious climate policy action” needed to meet the long-term targets the companies say they support, the report said.

The International Energy Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “have stressed the need for decisive policy interventions by governments in order to drive the energy transition and emissions reduction,” Sofia Basheer, the author of the report, said in an email.

“Most of the pathways recognized by the IPCC to get there involve substantial reductions in fossil fuels,” she said.

CAPP argues that, while the oil and gas emissions cap would force industry to cut back its production, other global producers would pick up the slack, resulting in no reduction in global emissions. The industry argues it should be encouraged to increase production if it can achieve emissions intensity lower than the global average.

The InfluenceMap report also notes that Canadian companies are lobbying for more government support to finance their adoption of the key technologies needed to reduce emissions in their operations, especially the use of carbon capture and storage (CCS).

Most of the pathways recognized by the IPCC to get there involve substantial reductions in fossil fuels.

–Sofia Basheer, analyst with InfluenceMap

In its pre-budget submission, Pathways Alliance calls for an expansion of the tax credit proposed by the federal government to cover operating costs as well as initial construction costs. It also urged Ottawa to adopt a “contract for differences” plan that would amount to an insurance policy to protect its investment if a future government scrapped the carbon tax or failed to follow through on planned increases.

In response to the InfluenceMap report, Cenovus Energy reiterated its commitment to reduce GHGs from its operations by 35% by 2035 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. “This will help ensure Cenovus remains resilient and can play an important role as the world moves toward a lower-carbon future,” the company said in an emailed statement. Cenovus said it reduced its methane emissions by 520,000 tonnes in 2021, and captured the equivalent of 90,000 tonnes of CO2 from its initial CCS facilities.

The InfluenceMap report notes that the IPCC has urged governments to end fossil fuel subsidies in order to hasten the transition to non-emitting energy sources. The call from Canadian oil companies for government support is “misaligned with IPCC guidance on fossil fuels,” it said.

The report noted that the industry has employed dubious narratives to argue for continued buildout of fossil fuel infrastructure and productive capacity, even though greater production of oil and gas would undermine Canada’s effort to achieve its international climate commitments. Those narratives include the claim that greater production of Canadian oil and natural gas could actually reduce global emissions and that it is needed to secure global energy security in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

All told, the InfluenceMap report suggests that the Canadian oil and gas industry remains far behind the curve – and even behind some of its European competitors – in taking the actions that the world needs to avert the most disastrous impacts of climate change. High-level corporate commitments need to be backed up with aggressive government regulations that speed up the pace of change.

The post Canadian oil and gas industry is actively lobbying against its net-zero targets: report appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But in the blistering summer of 2018, there was nothing celebratory about the Rhine. As Germany faced the hottest and driest weather since measurement began in 1881, the Rhine’s riverbed was reduced to a desiccated landscape of mudflats and dead fish. German industry, which uses the Rhine as a transportation lifeline, also suffered. The shrivelled Rhine of 2018 became a harbinger of the devastating impact that climate change will have on the backbone of the German economy.

Chemical giant BASF, whose headquarters and integrated chemical complex – the largest in the world – sit on the shores of the Rhine in Ludwigshafen, was hit particularly hard. Historically, some 40% of the raw materials entering the site do so by freight ships. In the summer of 2018, these were scraping bottom; cargo traffic was reduced to a trickle, and ships could be only partially laden. The river’s water was too warm to effectively cool BASF’s reactors. In total, production and delivery shortfalls caused by the 2018 heat wave cost BASF some €250 million (US$280 million), while its profits in the last quarter of the year were down nearly 60%.

Low water levels continue to plague BASF – and all the other major German chemical players that are concentrated along the Rhine. As they shift to shallower barges that carry only a fraction of the freight and less efficient rail and truck transport, they see their costs rise and their deliveries slow.

You’d expect a company so directly affected by climate change to be jumping on the decarbonization bandwagon. On the face of it, it is. To its iconic tagline, “We create chemistry,” BASF now adds “for a sustainable future.” But behind the scenes, Germany’s chemical industry – and BASF in particular – is proving to be exceptionally obstructive.

The British think tank InfluenceMap, which tracks corporate lobbying activity on climate policy, recently ranked BASF the third most “negative and influential” corporation in the world, following American oil giants Chevron and ExxonMobil in the first and second spots.

BASF resists the characterization, pointing to its track record – since 1990, the company has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 50% – and its objective to achieve net-zero by 2050 (five years later than the German national target of 2045). It has publicly endorsed the Paris Agreement on climate change as well as the EU’s target of being net-zero by 2050. And its product carbon footprint program, launched in 2020, allows customers to calculate the emissions generated “from cradle to gate” – through extraction, manufacturing and production – for all BASF products.

There is no question that the company is making moves in the right direction. In 2021, BASF purchased a major share of the world’s largest wind farm – Hollandse Kust Zuid – which is currently under construction in the North Sea, some 50 kilometres off the Dutch coast. The green electricity generated there will help power BASF’s European production sites, including Ludwigshafen.

Furthermore, the €10-billion engineering plastics plant BASF is now building in Zhanjiang, China, is slated to run entirely on renewable energy; the company is billing the facility – its third-largest globally – as a “role model of sustainable production both in China and around the world.”

But InfluenceMap looks beyond mainstream indicators to more subtle metrics: not only what companies present publicly in their annual reports, social media and public relations, but also the kind of research they sponsor, how they engage with regulators and elected officials and, importantly, the “indirect” lobbying they do through the industry associations they belong to. Taken together, InfluenceMap refers to this activity as a company’s “carbon policy footprint,” a kind of Scope 4 emissions.

Their analysis shows how common it is for a company’s outward claims to be at odds with its inner convictions. Eighty percent of the 25 companies deemed by InfluenceMap to have the most negative policy footprints look good on paper; like BASF, they have made net-zero commitments, and many, including BASF, scored A- or higher on Carbon Disclosure Project’s 2021 climate change disclosure scores, widely considered the gold standard of environmental reporting.

In exposing the gap between words and actions, InfluenceMap is not just looking to name and shame. The hope is that greater transparency will ultimately lead to a closer alignment between industry on the one hand and science-based policy benchmarks, like those articulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on the other. And for the most part, that’s what’s happening.

According to Will Aitchison, EU strategy manager for InfluenceMap, some sectors of the German economy – even its automotive industry – have started to genuinely reconcile themselves with Paris targets and support legislation in that direction. But the chemical industry is a standout, and for good reason. The largest industrial consumer of energy of all sectors, in Germany it has relied on an ample supply of cheap Russian gas. BASF’s facility in Ludwigshafen represents 4% of Germany’s total gas consumption: roughly as much energy as a city of one million people. Half of that gas is used as feedstock – a raw material – in the production of chemicals. The other half is used to generate electricity.

“The chemical sector is anchored in fossil fuels,” says Aitchison. “And its lobbying reflects that.”

The industry has a lot to lose from a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, and BASF more than most, thanks to its 67% stake in Wintershall Dea, the oil and gas producer that it co-owns with the Russian company LetterOne. Wintershall Dea is one of the five co-funders of Gazprom’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline – whose certification Germany halted following the Russian invasion of Ukraine – and remains invested in several Russian gas fields, producers and network operators.

It’s no wonder that BASF is the most “engaged of European chemical companies” in its climate lobbying, according to Aitchison. And BASF, the largest chemical company in the world, with €78.6 billion in sales in 2021 and 110,000 employees worldwide, has a lot of weight to throw around.

Taking a run at climate regulations

So how does it do that? For one, it quibbles with climate-related regulations. Take, for instance, Europe’s proposed carbon border adjustment mechanism. The measure, a central plank of the European Green Deal, will impose tariffs on carbon-intensive imports into the European Union as a way of preventing “carbon leakage” – the relocation of production to less climate-ambitious jurisdictions – while also encouraging non-EU countries to introduce carbon pricing.

Looking at its own product palette, BASF sees primarily the downsides to the mechanism. It uses its roughly €3.5-million annual lobbying budget in Brussels to repeatedly ask the European Commission to exempt ammonia, nitric acid and the products along its value chain: essential components of the polyamide, polyurethanes and amines that BASF feeds to the textile, automotive, agriculture and pharmaceutical industries. Fearing its own products will no longer be cost-competitive on global markets, BASF reminds the European Commission that its commitment is not only to climate neutrality but also to economic growth.

Likewise, BASF opposes the legislation of energy savings targets, arguing instead for greater energy efficiency and a transition to renewables. The position is reinforced by the Federation of German Industries (Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie, or BDI), the umbrella organization that represents some 100,000 companies – including BASF – and acts as the loudest mouthpiece for German industry. It advocates for energy reduction regulations only as a “last resort” and calls the EU’s proposed 1.5% energy savings target “unrealistic.”

Hiding behind industry groups

Companies frequently “get their industry associations to do the dirty work,” as InfluenceMap spokesperson Simon Cullen puts it. While most customers will recognize the name BASF, fewer will be following the BDI, or Cefic (the European Chemical Industry Council) or VCI (Verband der Chemischen Industrie) – all groups BASF belongs to and in which its executives play leading roles.

The relative anonymity of industry associations makes it much easier for them to push for policies that reflect their own vested interests. BDI, for instance, opposes the 2035 zero-emissions vehicle standard proposed by the European Commission and is lobbying the German federal government, in light of Russian gas shortages, to extend the use of coal and to facilitate a transition from gas back to oil.

Likewise, VCI is pushing for the EU to water down its taxonomy of sustainable finance to include economic activity involving gas. Currently, only 11% of BASF’s revenue is considered eligible for consideration under the EU Taxonomy. VCI and Cefic are both advocating against key elements of the proposed carbon border adjustment mechanism and in favour of a continuation of emissions allowances, which effectively forgive emissions for some producers.

This is the line that BASF walks: endorsing climate policy, unless or until it affects its own economic performance. “We are convinced that climate neutrality and sustainable resource use are not possible without a competitive chemical industry,” writes BASF spokesman Philipp Rosskopf in an email.

The implication is clear: BASF will be part of the solution, providing that its bottom line doesn’t suffer.

Investor pushback

Investors are paying attention. Since the asset management division of French banking group BNP Paribas began looking more closely at climate-related lobbying in 2018, it has seen “a rapid uptick in engagement on this issue by institutional investors,” according to spokesperson Claire Schiff. Together with a group of investor networks and other asset managers, BNP Paribas has established a global standard of responsible climate lobbying: a compendium of 14 indicators that can be used to assess how consistent a company’s advocacy work is with Paris targets.

“If there is misalignment, we expect corrective actions to be taken,” says Charlotta Sydstrand, spokesperson for Swedish public pension fund AP7, one of the instigators of the global standard. In 2018, AP7 asked BASF to review its own climate lobbying and publish a list of its memberships in industry associations. It obliged. The disclosure that BASF provided was given a failing grade by InfluenceMap. But the process at least created greater transparency and the beginnings of what people in the field refer to as “engagement” – the gentle tug of war between the forces of corporate self-interest and global responsibility.

A close look at BASF’s books suggests that these two objectives may not be so far apart after all. BASF distinguishes between what it calls accelerator sales – from products that are biodegradable, energy-saving or emissions-reducing, that make a “substantial sustainable contribution” – and the rest of its revenue. By BASF’s own calculations, revenues from its accelerator sales have grown at 69% over the last three years, as compared to 18% for the rest of its portfolio. And accelerator sales, currently 31% of the total, constitute an ever-growing share of BASF’s business.

The tide also seems to be turning at fellow chemical giant Bayer, which in the last year has endorsed the climate provisions in the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act and is pushing Germany to accelerate its expansion of renewables, rather than reboot fossil fuels, in the wake of Russian gas shortages.

With this kind of momentum, BASF shouldn’t feel the need to practise double-talk much longer. And the sooner it stops, the better.

The chemical sector is anchored in fossil fuels. And its lobbying reflects that.

-Will Aitchison, EU strategy manager for InfluenceMap

“If what you are saying to your investors does not line up with how you lobby, you have a big problem,” says Peter Damgaard Jensen, who for 19 years was CEO of one of Denmark’s largest pension funds and has served as chair of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC), a European body whose members – mainly pension funds and asset managers – collectively manage more than €51 trillion in assets.

Damgaard Jensen has listened to many companies distance themselves from their industry associations or claim that they have no choice but to go along. He has no time for such excuses. Membership in associations is rarely mandatory, and companies like BASF have considerable sway over the ones to which they belong. It behooves them to lead, not to follow. And investor coalitions like the IIGCC are only getting more assertive.

“They won’t change us,” Damgaard Jensen says. “It’s us that will change them.”

It won’t happen overnight. Damgaard Jensen calls the process a “long dialogue” in which European companies tend to be moving faster than American ones, with BASF a notable exception. He acknowledges that the transition away from fossil fuels poses a particular challenge for the chemical industry; demand for its products continues to grow, while its most critical input is under threat.

But companies won’t meet the challenge by dodging it, or lobbying themselves into a corner, surrounded by their own stranded assets. They must exercise model corporate behaviour: basing today’s decisions on where they see themselves 20 years down the road and talking to everyone – government, shareholders and their peers – out of one and the same side of their mouths.

The post The Climate Blockers: BASF quietly lobbies against strong climate policy while talking a big game appeared first on Corporate Knights.

There are 636 lobbyists from the oil and gas industries registered to attend the UN event in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. At Glasgow, the figure was 503, which outnumbered the delegation of any single country. This year the only country with a larger delegation is the United Arab Emirates, hosts of Cop28 next year, which has 1,070 registered delegates, up from 176 last year.

At Cop27, “the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists is greater than frontline countries and communities. Delegations from African countries and Indigenous communities are dwarfed by representatives of corporate interests”, said the group Kick Big Polluters out, which campaigns against the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists at the climate negotiations.

The data on lobbyists, compiled by the organisations Corporate Accountability, Global Witness and Corporate Europe Observatory, shows the growing influence of oil and gas interests at the climate talks. While many environmental groups hoping to encourage the transition away from fossil fuels say it can be beneficial to bring private interests to the negotiating table, these benefits risk being outweighed by the sheer size of the delegations and suspicions that lobbyists attend the talks to slow progress rather than discuss limiting their own industries.

Civil society groups fear that the increasing presence of fossil fuel lobbyists risks stymieing negotiations at an essential time, amid efforts to keep global temperature rises within the 1.5°C of warming scientists agree is needed to prevent catastrophic climate change.

“The explosion in the number of industry delegates attending the negotiations reinforces the conviction of the climate justice community that the industry views the COP as a carnival of sorts, and not a space to address the ongoing and imminent climate crisis,” said Kwami Kpondzo from Friends of the Earth Togo.

In a recent submission to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – the body that oversees COP – to discuss the role of private business at the talks, a coalition of civil society groups said climate action would “continue to fail to meaningfully address the climate crisis as long as polluting interests are granted unmitigated access to policymaking processes and are allowed to unduly influence and weaken the critical work of the UNFCCC”.

In response, the United States Council for International Business pushed back against any suggestion that there should be limits on corporate interests at the climate talks, saying this would “damage and slow implementation [and] marginalise one of the most central constituencies in the UNFCCC process”.

This article by The Guardian is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

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