Climate

The fossil fuel industry’s presence at this year’s UN climate negotiations in Baku, Azerbaijan, has been simultaneously heavy-handed and covert. More than 1,770 lobbyists—including the heads of some major oil and gas corporations—have been granted access to the talks, many as guests of the host country. The numbers dwarf those of almost every country delegation and threaten to drown out the voices of Global South nations—not to mention Indigenous peoples, youth, women and others who disproportionately bear the brunt of climate impacts. The industry’s close access to the leaders of the negotiations raises questions about how COP29 will stay on track toward the goals of increasing much-needed climate finance and following through on a fast, fair transition away from fossil fuels.

Even more alarming, the fossil fuel industry’s influence at COPs is deeply entrenched and goes beyond lobbying. We’ve seen it at COP29 with greenwashing by corporations and trade associations, misrepresentations of what science deems necessary to address the climate crisis, and a widening ambition gap due to the insidious effects of fossil fuel influence.

To help parties break free from the grip of fossil fuel interests, here’s a guide to the top five ways the fossil fuel industry is trying to co-opt climate talks—and a call to world leaders to resist them.

1. Showing strength in numbers

Late last week, the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition revealed that at least 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access to COP29, outnumbering nearly every national delegation attending the talks in Azerbaijan. This is a major presence for the industry primarily responsible for driving destructive and deadly climate change and more than all the delegates from the ten most climate-vulnerable countries combined (1,033 people badged).

According to the provisional list of registered on-site participants, major fossil fuel corporations BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies brought a total of 44 lobbyists to COP29. Participating in and influencing COPs has been part of ExxonMobil’s playbook for decades. Darren Woods, the corporation’s chair and CEO, is one of 12 ExxonMobil lobbyists in Baku. By comparison, Guyana—a country vulnerable to floods, droughts, sea-level rise, and other climate impacts (and where ExxonMobil is being sued over its offshore oil extraction projects)—also has 12 representatives at COP29.

2. Obtaining high-level access

But it’s not just the numbers. It’s who’s representing the fossil fuel industry, and who they are consorting with. The heads of several major oil and gas corporations—Aramco, BP, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies—are included in the provisional registration list as guests of the host country.

ExxonMobil’s Woods showed up at COP29 as a host country guest. He was invited to speak at a high-level meeting convened by the COP Presidency—an unparalleled opportunity to personally cultivate political leaders from around the world and attempt to define the terms of the energy transition in ways that perpetuate reliance on fossil fuel products and grow corporate profits.

Meanwhile, Woods discouraged US President-elect Trump from withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, saying “The way you influence things is to participate, not to exit.” Ironically, this is one point on which I would agree with ExxonMobil’s CEO—with one significant amendment when it comes to the fossil fuel industry: “The way you influence things UNDULY is to participate…”

3. Refusing to pay up

Climate finance is the top priority for COP29, and one leg of the financial stool is funding for lower income countries to address loss and damage from fossil fuel-driven climate impacts. The year 2024 is on track to be the hottest year on record, with extreme weather events leaving a trail of death and destruction across the globe. While major fossil fuel corporations continue to rake in massive profits, people and communities in the Global South bear a disproportionate burden of these disasters—which is why many in the climate justice movement are campaigning to Make Big Polluters Pay.

Demonstrators at COP29 calling for industries and corporations that have fueled and continue to worsen the climate crisis to be held liable. Source: Kathy Mulvey/UCS USA

According to a new report commissioned by the International Chamber of Commerce, climate-related extreme weather events have cost the global economy more than $2 trillion over the past decade. In a painful irony, this is the same International Chamber of Commerce whose delegation to COP29 includes 33 fossil fuel industry lobbyists—and whose US arm pushes the oil and gas industry’s anti-climate agenda. (Read more in this blogpost by my UCS colleague Laura Peterson).

Earlier this year, Azerbaijan, the host country for COP29, announced a Climate Finance Action Fund to be capitalized with $1 billion in voluntary contributions from fossil fuel-producing countries and oil, gas, and coal companies. However, the fund’s launch—set for Climate Finance Day at COP29—has been quietly postponed. The shelving of the fund marks a small victory for advocates who had decried the initiative as a problematic distraction from the imperative for the United States and other wealthy nations— the responsible parties at these UN climate talks—to collectively provide at least $1 trillion per year in grants or very low-interest loans. National and international policymakers must be wary of voluntary approaches that low-ball polluters’ responsibility, risk granting them social license, and could give them inappropriate influence over decisions about how the funds are spent.

4. Conniving to cash in

Even as the fossil fuel industry avoids paying its fair share of the mounting costs of fossil fuel-driven climate harms, fossil fuel subsidies bankrolled by governments (and taxpayers) around the world soared to $7 trillion in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Here at COP29, ExxonMobil’s Woods added insult to these compounding injuries when he demanded that governments create “incentives” for companies to transition to less carbon-intensive energy sources. The problem: ExxonMobil has its own misleading, dangerous definition of “advancing climate solutions” that its lobbyists are no doubt pitching to COP29 decisionmakers. The corporation’s “low carbon” roadmap relies heavily on technologies such as carbon capture and storage and hydrogen that cannot deliver steep emissions cuts in the critical period between now and 2030. In an interview with The New York Times while he was at COP29, Woods bragged that he resisted investor “pressure to get into the wind and solar business”—and ExxonMobil’s stock soared as the company doubled down on oil and gas.

While fossil fuel industry lobbyists continue their efforts to delay the urgently needed phaseout of oil, gas, and coal, they’re simultaneously trying to co-opt the clean energy transition by demanding subsidies from governments for technologies that aren’t likely to play a material role in meeting 2030 climate targets. Countries must resist any attempt by the fossil fuel industry to swindle funding that should rightly be put toward climate finance desperately needed by nations in the Global South.

5. Greenwashing, diverting attention, and capturing the conversation

During the first week of COP29, I didn’t catch any fossil fuel industry lobbyists in the act of lobbying at the Olympic Stadium where the talks are being held, as such conversations are most likely taking place behind closely guarded doors staffed with security. But the fossil fuel industry’s presence is pervasive and prominent:

• The COP29 Presidency hired Teneo—a public relations firm with close ties to the oil and gas industry—to enhance its image ahead of the talks.
• The Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter—a voluntary initiative launched at COP28 by oil and gas corporations and condemned by hundreds of civil society organizations as a greenwashing ploy—has predictably resurfaced at COP29 after minimal visibility or progress over the past year.
• Events in the business pavilion have been sponsored by oil and gas corporations including Chevron, ExxonMobil, SOCAR, and TotalEnergies.

I’ve spent hours walking around the pavilions in the Blue Zone, where the official negotiations take place, and the public Green Zone, collecting numerous examples of corporate greenwashing. I’ve seen posters promoting natural gas as “the cleanest of hydrocarbons,” dozens of “net zero” claims, and cartoons touting the deployment of problematic technologies over proven climate solutions.

In the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) pavilion, I found a banner announcing that “oil touches our daily lives in different ways.” In oil-producing regions of the world, that statement is painfully true—people suffer health problems, environmental devastation, displacement, and loss of livelihoods and cultural heritage.

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Friday Nbani Barilule, who leads the Lekeh Economic Development Foundation in Nigeria, took the opportunity to share how oil touches his life and that of others in the Niger Delta region where he lives and works. Watch his testimony here and read more in my blogpost about last month’s Niger Delta Climate Change Conference.

Overcoming fossil fuel industry influence with public policies, investor action, and climate litigation

Fossil fuel corporations and their surrogates shouldn’t have a seat at the negotiating table where climate policy is being made. Allowing them access is like setting the cat loose among the pigeons. Corporations such as BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell—which have engaged in a decades-long campaign to deceive the public and policymakers and block or delay climate action—have repeatedly shown that they can’t be trusted as good-faith players in climate policymaking.

Even as they continue to exert undue influence over climate policy, major fossil fuel corporations insist that we focus only on governments to advance climate action. Shortly after new evidence emerged that Shell and other oil and gas corporations knew of the planet-heating effects of their products as early as 1954, a Dutch appeals court overturned an earlier order requiring Shell to cut its global warming emissions by 45% by 2030. In celebrating the ruling, Shell urged people to “lobby governments rather than Shell to change policies and bring about a green transition.”

UCS and our allies will continue to lobby governments, and we’ll continue to work with climate-conscious investors to pressure corporations to slash their heat-trapping emissions and align their lobbying with their stated support for the Paris climate agreement. And we recognize the symbiotic relationship between international climate negotiations and climate litigation. UCS’s Science Hub for Climate Litigation is building a community of scientists to help meet the great demand for scientific expertise to inform litigation and legal action around the world.

As the United States and other nations grapple with surging disinformation and drastic anti-climate political change, COP29 has an opportunity to show the world that international diplomacy remains a vital means to address the global climate crisis. As the fossil fuel industry employs a range of strategies to co-opt and derail the process, negotiators must exercise political will to overcome these schemes. We’ll measure world leaders’ success in COP29 decisions that begin to remedy the harms people around the world are already experiencing, accelerate the phaseout of fossil fuels, and fund an equitable global transition to clean energy.

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How usual is it to have G20 happening at the same time as Cop? According to Jen Iris Allan, a senior lecturer at Cardiff University who also writes the Regular Earth Negotiations Bulletin, commenting on Bluesky, it’s not normal at all.

Cop29 happening at the same time as the G20 is a rare opportunity. It gets the leaders of the big economies together in a small setting. They could strike a side deal that would really help here.

The new climate finance target is the big issue that will define COP29. Government ministers are arriving to thrash out everything from the amount of money raised to who contributes towards it.

We’ve seen a few versions of the text as parties make sure their views are represented while trying to produce something their governments can work with. The number of “options” is lower than it was on Wednesday. But the number of brackets - meaning undecided bits - is higher.

It’s still long: 25 pages. Negotiators started with a 9-page text, which they rejected as “unbalanced” - then lots of stuff got added back in. It will need to be shorter. The EU chief negotiator told journalists last week that a 2-page text could capture “everything we need”.

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Almost half of voters (48%) want the Australian government to review Aukus and the acquisition of nuclear submarines after the election of Donald Trump in the US.

Those are the results of the latest Guardian Essential poll of 1,206 voters, which found Australian voters were concerned about the incoming Trump administration’s effect on the economy, peace and climate change.

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Senior ministers are arriving in an effort to break a deadlock over the summit’s main goal: funding to help lower-income countries hit hard by global warming.

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As the second week of the UN climate talks, COP29, get underway in Baku, Azerbaijan, negotiations are reaching a critical stage.

Nations remain far apart in reaching agreement on a new climate finance commitment from richer countries and will need to double down on efforts over the next few days to secure an ambitious outcome. Finance is the top priority for this COP and is the linchpin to help lower-income nations transition from fossil fuels to clean energy, close the energy poverty gap, adapt to climate impacts, and address mounting loss and damage.  

What the science says is needed for international climate finance

As a report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) points out, the goal of tripling renewables and doubling energy efficiency by 2030 that countries agreed to last year in Dubai requires investments on the order of $1.5 trillion annually. The International Energy Agency confirms that midcentury climate goals can be met but will require trillions of dollars for renewable energy, energy efficiency, grid transmission, and energy storage. Those investments will deliver huge climate and public health benefits from reduced fossil fuel pollution. Meanwhile, the latest UN Adaptation Gap report estimates that the finance gap for adaptation is $187-359 billion per year. And with every year of delay on robust climate action, loss and damage is piling up across the world. 

US election results cast pall over COP29 opening days

The US election results, coming just days before COP29 started, certainly cast a pall over the opening days of COP29. The United States is the largest historical emitter of heat-trapping emissions and a major player at these negotiations. The prospect of an incoming Trump administration that has threatened to exit the Paris Agreement and roll back key climate and clean energy policies is deeply concerning, especially against a backdrop of rapidly worsening climate impacts and a continued rise in global heat-trapping emissions. Unfortunately, with a prospective anti-science administration that seems hellbent on undermining global diplomacy, we can fully expect that they will follow through on their threats.  

While some politically and economically popular clean energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act may prove durable and action from forward-looking states and businesses will be significant, there’s no doubt that a lack of robust federal leadership will leave US climate action hobbled for a time. Other nations—including the European Union nations and China—and states and businesses in the US will need to step up to fill the void.  

Nevertheless, here at COP29, the Biden administration still represents the US, and, despite the election outcome, has an important opportunity to show leadership, take responsibility, and champion ambitious outcomes in these negotiations. These global outcomes can also help set north star goals for what’s needed well past the term of the next administration.  

UCS delegation at the COP29 venue. Credit: Rachel Cleetus, UCS.

Ahead of COP, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) joined over 80 US-based groups in sending a letter urging the Biden administration to support an agreement to collectively provide at least $1 trillion annually in climate finance for lower income nations. UCS is also calling on the Biden administration to announce an ambitious emissions reduction commitment for the country—aka a nationally determined contribution (NDC)—for 2035. That will give the climate advocates, subnational actors, and others who support climate action an important goal to rally around through the Trump administration’s term and beyond. Cutting emissions sharply by ramping up renewable energy and transitioning away from fossil fuels is good for the nation’s economy and for public health, in addition to contributing to global climate efforts to stave off the worst impacts of climate change.

Climate finance negotiation status at COP29 

Week one of COP29 saw little progress on the core issue of climate finance—or the new collective quantified goal (NCQG)—with the negotiating text still at a lengthy 25 pages and containing a lot of bracketed options showing areas where nations have still not reached consensus. The key and contentious issues of the overall quantity of finance, the quality of the sources finance (e.g. public grants versus loans), and how to define which nations will be part of the contributor base will be punted to the ministerial segment, which gets underway in the coming days.  

On the issue of expanding the contributor base, it was encouraging to see China announce that it has already provided and mobilized $24.5 billion in climate finance for developing nations since 2016, which closely matches estimates of China’s south-south finance contributions from US-based experts at WRI.  

A new study recently released by the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance (IHLEG), underscored the need for climate finance to be made available to developing countries (not including China) on the order of at least $1 trillion annually by 2030, and $1.3 trillion by 2035. This is the third report of the IHLEG, which has been providing an independent perspective on the finance agenda since COP26. Overall, the report estimates that “the global projected investment requirement for climate action is around $6.3–6.7 trillion per year by 2030.” The report also warns that if countries fail to marshal sufficient funding in a timely way, the task of cutting emissions becomes much harder, requiring more money more quickly, and that funding needs for adaptation and loss and damage will also rise sharply as climate change worsens.  

Another new study, from the Global Solidarity Levies Taskforce, shows opportunities for raising funds from innovative sources to help meet climate finance goals. Options could include a cryptocurrency levy (which could raise $5.2 billion annually), a tax on the ultra-wealthy (which could raise $200-250 billion annually), and a plastics production levy (which could raise $25-35 billion annually). These kinds of options should be additive to what is committed directly by richer nations through public finance and would require global tax agreements outside of the UN climate talks.  

Adaptation and Loss and Damage Funds need more contributions at COP29 to deliver for climate-vulnerable nations

During the first week of COP29, there was a signing ceremony to finally get the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage operationalized so it can start receiving and disbursing funding for lower income nations often coping with the most extreme impacts of climate change. The World Bank is serving as the trustee for the Fund and the Fund’s first executive director, Ibrahima Cheikh Diong, began his four-year term this month.  

Global civil society representatives meet with new UN Fund for Loss and Damage Executive Director Ibrahima Cheikh Diong. Credit: Rachel Cleetus, UCS

While this marks important progress for this hard-won fund, the amount of actual funding collected remains woefully inadequate. At COP29, only one new contribution has come in—$19 million from Sweden—bringing the overall amount to $720 million thus far. Last year at COP28 in Dubai, the United States contributed a paltry $17.5 million to the fund.  Without a significant ramp-up in pledges, this fund will not deliver justice for those on the most acute frontlines of the climate crisis. And to ensure ongoing predictable and adequate levels of funding, it’s crucial for the NCQG agreement to also include specific provisions for funding for loss and damage.  

Meanwhile, the UN’s Adaptation Fund is also suffering from gross underinvestment. So far, that fund has only raised contributions of around $61 million from donor countries, far short of its annual goal of $300 million. And richer countries are still far off track from delivering on their pledge to double adaptation finance to at least $40 billion annually by 2025.  

Adaptation has historically received much less attention and funding than emissions reduction efforts and is much less attractive for private sector, profit-driven investments. It must get appropriate attention in the NCQG outcome, and it’s especially important to ensure the focus is on grant-based funding so as not to feed into the cycle of debt with which low-income nations are already contending. 

What countries need to do in final week to guarantee a good COP29 outcome

The midpoint of climate negotiations is always a challenging time. Not enough progress has been made thus far at COP29, and the clock is ticking for nations to reach consensus on a range of crunch issues. This is the time for major emitting nations, especially richer countries, to show leadership and negotiate in good faith to maintain trust and credibility. There are some hopes that the G20 summit happening simultaneously this week in Brazil can deliver some helpful climate breakthroughs from major economies that could contribute to advancing proceedings at COP.  

The major presence and influence of fossil fuel lobbyists at COP29 continues to be alarming. As my colleague Kathy Mulvey notes: “Countries must resist any attempt by the fossil fuel industry to swindle funding that should rightly be put toward climate finance desperately needed by Global South nations.”   

The science is clear that without urgent collective action, the world could be on track for a catastrophic rise in global average temperatures of up to 3.1°C above pre-industrial levels this century. Meanwhile, extreme climate-fueled disasters—like hurricanes Helene and Milton in the United States, devastating floods in Spain, and Typhoon Man-yi that just hit the Philippines—continue to batter people and economies around the world.  

As the final week marathon gets underway, UCS will join civil society colleagues to make sure the voice of the people is loud and present at COP29, and that world leaders feel the pressure to deliver science-aligned, ambitious, and equitable outcomes. We have already participated in press conferences (see here and here), engaged in direct advocacy with negotiators, and joined in public actions at COP29—all geared toward pushing forward our key asks.  

Cat sitting on cardboard house in Baku’s Old City. Ashley Siefert Nunes/UCS.

And for a more light-hearted take, check out the cats of Baku, who have also joined forces with us in meowing for more climate finance.  

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Spain’s economy minister has urged the world’s richest countries to “be brave” and redouble efforts to reach an agreement on a global minimum tax on the world’s 3,000 billionaires, saying recent elections have shown citizens are demanding “redistribution of wealth”.

Speaking during a visit to London before the gathering of G20 leaders in Rio de Janeiro on Monday, Carlos Cuerpo said the plan had gained political momentum since the summer, when finance ministers agreed to work together to “ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed”.

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El presidente recorrió la selva tropical y prometió a Brasil fondos para iniciativas medioambientales, a pesar de que el gobierno de Trump parece dispuesto a hacerlas retroceder.

The president toured the rainforest and promised Brazil funds for environmental initiatives, even as the incoming Trump administration appears poised to roll them back.

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Pacific governments at a UN climate summit are criticising Australia’s plans for a massive gas industry expansion in Western Australia, saying it could result in 125 times more greenhouse gas emissions than their island nations release in a year.

As the Cop29 summit in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku begins its second week, representatives from Vanuatu and Tuvalu have called on Australia to stop approving new fossil fuel developments, including a proposal to extend the life of Woodside’s North West Shelf gas facility until 2070.

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