Bringing the bad guys into the room to help solve a problem can sometimes work. There are many instances of reformed gangsters successfully working to mentor local youth to drive down crime levels. However, the key word here is ‘reformed.’ Whether it concerns the climate COP process, the EU packaging waste regulations, or last week’s fourth session of the intergovernmental negotiating committee (INC-4) on a global plastics treaty, we have heard the argument that it makes sense to have the fossil fuel industry in the room and around the table. Sadly, given their behaviour it seems more akin to inviting fully-fledged, active, gun-toting, crack-smoking and entirely unreformed gangsters to have a helpful chat with the local vulnerable youngsters.
The big oil companies are unreformed gangsters and should not be allowed to come and sabotage efforts to combat climate change and plastic pollution. Strong words from the Laundromat perhaps, but there are much louder and more authoritative voices saying the very same thing. Despite the fossil fuel industry’s fierce resistance and lack of cooperation, the results of a 3-year-long investigation by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability (House Oversight) were released in the United States yesterday Wednesday 1 May 2024. The report, entitled Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak: Big Oil’s evolving efforts to avoid accountability for climate change is based on the contents of extensive internal corporate communications obtained via subpoenas.
This glimpse into the murky interior world of ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell USA, BP America, the American Petroleum Institute (API), and the US Chamber of Commerce demonstrates that these companies and industry associations acknowledge internally that they have understood since at least the 1960s that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and then worked for decades to undermine public understanding of this fact and to deny the underlying science. Despite many documents having been redacted or simply withheld, it is nonetheless clear that these firms operate at a spectacular level of cynicism. They seem to know full well that ‘natural’ gas is not an effective transition fuel, and its continued promotion and use will send the world way off Paris temperature pathways. None of them are fooled by their own carbon capture rhetoric either, as they seem to know that it is unscalable and economically unviable as a core solution to climate change.
Net Zero credibility
The report also reveals that their public climate commitments are meaningless to them. As the House Committee report’s authors put it: “Big Oil companies make public pledges to support the Paris Agreement and to achieve net zero emissions while internally recognising that they could not achieve those goals or referring to them as outside of their business plans.” The fact is not many people are fooled by these net-zero pledges either, with studies showing that not a single major oil company is anywhere near to being aligned with the Paris agreement targets.
The crucial fourth out of five planned INC meetings to advance the global plastic treaty took place in Ottawa last week, and the fossil fuel industry was out in force. Having realised that global efforts to curb plastic pollution, coupled with expected reductions in fossil fuel use for transport and energy could put a serious dent in the sector’s astronomical profits, Big Oil sent close to 200 unreformed gangsters – sorry, lobbyists – to INC-4. In contrast, the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastic Treaty had only 58 attendees in Ottawa. One of these, Bethanie Carney Almroth, an ecotoxicology professor from the University of Gothenburg told AP news that scientists were harassed and intimidated by oil lobbyists at the event. She had also reported to the U.N. that a lobbyist had yelled in her face at a meeting. The scientists were there to keep the discussions grounded in facts but struggled to keep up with and counter the disinformation being spread by the many lobbyists. One such example reported by Almroth was an affirmation that no data exists on microplastics despite the availability of roughly 21,000 academic publications on the topic.
The biggest battleground in these INC meetings is the old Laundromat favourite of upstream versus downstream solutions. The rather obvious idea of curbing plastic waste by reducing the supply of raw virgin plastics and finding alternatives appears to have just about survived so far, but Big Plastic a.k.a Big Oil is fighting tooth and nail to scupper the concept in favour of vague ‘circularity’ solutions. The latter boil down to recycling, preferably not at the producers’ extended responsibility. As the producers well know, recycling is a hassle, creates a messy mix of incompatible plastics that are no good for reuse, and costs money that could be much better spent on executive bonuses. The laundromat calls on national governments and supranational bodies to keep the gangster lobbyists out of these vital international climate, biodiversity, and plastic pollution negotiations.
