The Fossil Fuel Industry Continues to Exert Undue Influence Over COP29, Activists Say

High-emitting developed countries prevented the UNFCCC from adopting conflict-of-interest guidelines for the annual climate talks from the very beginning.

BAKU, Azerbaijan—This year’s COP29 climate conference started right where last year’s meeting in Dubai left off—with more conflict-of-interest woes around a senior official recorded trying to use the meeting to arrange fossil fuel development deals.

And once again, fossil fuel lobbyists at the talks outnumber all but the largest national delegations. That’s raising renewed concerns that undue influence by oil and gas companies at annual climate talks is a key factor in the lack of progress toward global climate goals—at a time when death and destruction from global warming keeps worsening.

A preliminary analysis of the attendance list by Kick Big Polluters Out, a nonprofit watchdog group, shows at least 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists at the Baku conference, a presence that conflicts with the stated aims of COP29, said Rachitaa Gupta with the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice.

Gupta said climate campaigners reject the argument that fossil fuel companies need to be at the table during the global talks.

“It’s equivalent to asking, ‘Are you OK to talk to the arsonists who burned your house to the ground to find a solution to fix your house,’” she said. 

As it is, many of the corporate lobbyists attend as part of national delegations. That gives them direct access to the negotiators who decide what the outcomes will be, Gupta said.

“They’re literally in the ears of the governments who have been given the responsibility to come here by the people who are directly impacted by the climate crisis,” she said. “What that means is, when the negotiations get really intense, when they go into the phase where even observers are kept out, they still have access to these negotiators. They can see things unfolding in real time and have access to influence them in real time.”

That gives lobbyists full access to, for instance, thwart efforts by countries to enact enforceable greenhouse gas emission cuts, rather than voluntary ones.

There are good reasons to keep the energy industry at the table, said Samantha Gross, director of the energy and climate initiative at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, D.C.

“It’s hard to change the energy industry without involving the current energy industry, and their size and experience executing big projects are very useful,” Gross said. 

But Gupta doesn’t see the global climate talks as the right place for that type of discussion.

“This is a policy space, not a space where we find technical solutions,” she said. “If fossil fuel companies are really committed to fighting the climate crisis, to cutting emissions, they can work with the governments at the national level to do it. They can work collectively at the global level in a different space.”

Inclusive Process Key to Success

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was set up to include as many voices as possible, and has made a difference, slightly bending the emissions curve downward, as well as generating hundreds of billions of dollars in climate financing.

An approach that includes existing energy industries is exactly what’s needed to stay on a path to effectively slow climate change, said Frank Maisano, who has lobbied on behalf of oil and gas companies and other businesses at the annual climate conferences on and off since 1998.

“I am adamant that all stakeholders need [to] have a seat at the table, or else we won’t get a reasonable policy that is politically viable, economically viable and globally viable,” he said. “In my mind, those who are trying to block any stakeholders are short-sighting the process. They want an advantage for their side, but they don’t want to understand the true concept of how we get to a global agreement.”

Maisano said the Kigali Amendment that reduced the use of hydrofluorocarbons, which are potent greenhouse gases, shows the importance of industry involvement in building durable global environmental deals. Similarly, he said oil and gas companies are going to be key players in driving climate solutions.

“But they’re not going to be part of the solution that many activists want, because they don’t want any oil and gas at all,” he said. “That’s not a realistic or viable position. It will never get us to a meaningful reduction in emissions, because it’ll just bankrupt the economy.” 

In fact, there’s plentiful research showing that the renewable energy transition is driving economic growth. Likewise, research including the most recent assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that, without steep cuts of greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, warming will reach close to 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. That level of climate change will be disastrous for the economy, in addition to health and safety, experts warn.

UNFCCC officials did not immediately respond to questions about fossil fuel industry influence on the climate talks. But they have previously said that the talks are primarily driven by member states, and that any substantial changes would have to be initiated and approved by those states. 

Because all major UNFCCC decisions are adopted by consensus, that would require approval from countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States, whose economies all benefit greatly from the continued production and consumption of fossil fuels.

And as the annual conferences have grown to include as many as 80,000 people, the costs have increased, and so fossil fuel companies and other industries have been invited to sponsor events in exchange for privileged direct access to negotiators, Christina Toenshoff, a political scientist at Leiden University, wrote recently in The Conversation. When those lobbyists are part of national delegations, they also can provide direct input on draft resolutions.

Lobbying related to the climate talks often centers around providing information when officials need to make decisions or take positions on complex issues like carbon taxes, emissions trading or subsidies for hydrogen energy research, Toenshoff added. Lobbyists will advocate for positions that benefit their companies but often conflict with the greater public interest, she wrote.

One of the reasons Brookings’ Gross sees value in industry presence at climate talks is that countries don’t need to wait for a full energy transition to make key greenhouse gas reductions.

“Reducing methane emissions and flaring are very important, and often inexpensive,” she said. “Clearly this won’t get us to zero, but running the current energy system in a lower-emissions way buys us time.”

About a third of all warming is from methane emissions, she said. “They aren’t all from oil and gas, but reducing methane emissions is a good way to get some quick wins.”

But in the U.S., the American Petroleum Institute just asked the incoming Trump administration to roll back a methane-emissions fee the Biden administration imposed to incentivize such reductions. And at this point in the climate crisis, Gupta said, an incremental approach is not adequate.

“I’ve been seeing that half my country gets ravaged by devastating heat waves every year, and then the other half is flooded,” said Gupta, who’s from India. “All of this is happening because of the historical emissions driven by fossil fuel companies. For us, it boils down to literal survival when we come to this space. When we come here, we are fighting for our very lives.”

She said she loses colleagues every year, not just to the climate crisis itself, but to the growing crackdowns on climate activists all over the world, based on new laws passed after fossil fuel lobbying.

“For us, when we are in the same space with the people who are literally wrecking our lives, it is not just heartbreaking, it is infuriating,” she said. “It is equivalent to forcing us to sit and negotiate with a criminal that murdered my family, and it is unimaginable. This is why we really hope that the governments can see why we’re angry when it comes to fossil fuel lobbyists or big polluters in general, and why we hope we can start a process to ensure that our voices are heard more than those of big industries.”

Is the U.N. Ignoring its Own Conflict of Interest Guidelines?

Most other major international negotiations at the United Nations have conflict-of-interest policies. For example, tobacco company involvement was strictly limited when the World Health Organization developed its Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, with similar limits on pharmaceutical companies during ongoing discussions about a global pandemic treaty. 

But in the case of the climate talks, corporate influence isn’t in keeping with those guidelines. The UNFCCC took small steps to increase transparency on who is attending the annual climate talks by requiring disclosures of affiliation during registration, but that does not eliminate conflicts of interest, said Gupta.

Civil society groups have been pushing the UNFCCC Secretariat for years during regularly scheduled meetings to adopt clear conflict-of-interest rules for the climate talks, but she said the response has always been that it’s something that has to come from the member countries. 

“What we really need is a conflict of interest policy to be tabled and formalized,” Gupta said. “There is precedent under the U.N. umbrella

where several conflict of interest policies exist. The U.N. has been constituted for the governments to reach collective solutions, to solve collective global problems.” 

What the U.N. does not have a mandate for is to create spaces for private interests, she said, adding that there is nothing to prevent the UNFCCC from drafting such a policy for the climate talks and presenting it to the parties on the basis of the U.N.’s overall conflict-of-interest policies, she said.

Making the climate talks more people-driven and less corporate is the only path to just solutions for the climate crisis, Gupta argues. 

“Let people in, let people share the realities, let people come and present the solutions,” she said. “Imagine if, at COP30 or 31, the fossil fuel companies are out of the process. You can already start envisioning how the negotiations would go. You can imagine how much more power developing countries would have.”

Cover photo: Activists protesting against fossil fuel lobbyists participating in COP29 demonstrate on day five of the UNFCCC climate conference on Nov. 15 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images