Big Oil spent $1 billion on climate lobbying since 2015 Paris deal: Report

The five largest publicly listed oil and gas majors have spent $1 billion since the 2015 Paris climate deal on public relations or lobbying that is "overwhelmingly in conflict" with the landmark accord's goals, a watchdog said Friday.
Despite outwardly committing to support the Paris agreement and its aim to limit global temperature rises, ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP and Total spend a total of $200 million a year on efforts "to operate and expand fossil fuel operations," according to InfluenceMap, a pro-transparency monitor.

Two of the companies -- Shell and Chevron -- said they rejected the watchdog's findings.
"The fossil fuel sector has ramped up a quite strategic programme of influencing the climate agenda," InfluenceMap Executive Director Dylan Tanner told AFP.
"It's a continuum of activity from their lobby trade groups attacking the details of regulations, controlling them all the way up, to controlling the way the media thinks about the oil majors and climate."
The report comes as oil and gas giants are under increasing pressure from shareholders to come clean over how greener lawmaking will impact their business models.
As planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions hit their highest levels in human history in 2018, the five companies wracked up total profits of $55 billion.
At the same time, the International Panel on Climate Change -- composed of the world's leading climate scientists -- issued a call for a radical drawdown in fossil fuel use in order to hit the 1.5C (2.7 Fahrenheit) cap laid out in the Paris accord.
InfluenceMap looked at accounts, lobbying registers and communications releases since 2015, and alleged a large gap between the climate commitments companies make and the action they take.
It said all five engaged in lobbying and "narrative capture" through direct contact with lawmakers and officials, spending millions on climate branding, and by employing trade associations to represent the sector's interests in policy discussions.
"The research reveals a trend of carefully devised campaigns of positive messaging combined with negative policy lobbying on climate change," it said.
It added that of the more than USD 110 billion the five had earmarked for capital investment in 2019, just $3.6bn was given over to low-carbon schemes.
The report came one day after the European Parliament was urged to strip ExxonMobil lobbyists of their access, after the US giant failed to attend a hearing where expert witnesses said the oil giant has knowingly misled the public over climate change.
"How can we accept that companies spending hundreds of millions on lobbying against the EU's goal of reaching the Paris agreement are still granted privileged access to decision makers?" said Pascoe Sabido, Corporate Europe Observatory's climate policy researcher, who was not involved in the InfluenceMap report.
The report said Exxon alone spent USD 56 million a year on "climate branding" and USD 41 million annually on lobbying efforts.
In 2017 the company's shareholders voted to push it to disclose what tougher emissions policies in the wake of Paris would mean for its portfolio.
With the exception of France's Total, each oil major had largely focused climate lobbying expenditure in the US, the report said.
Chevron alone has spent more than USD 28 million in US political donations since 1990, according to the report.
AFP contacted all five oil and gas companies mentioned in the report for comment.
"We disagree with the assertion that Chevron has engaged in 'climate-related branding and lobbying' that is 'overwhelmingly in conflict' with the Paris Agreement," said a Chevron spokesman.
"We are taking action to address potential climate change risks to our business and investing in technology and low carbon business opportunities that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions." A spokeswoman for Shell -- which the report said spends $49 million annually on climate lobbying -- said it "firmly rejected" the findings.
"We are very clear about our support for the Paris Agreement, and the steps that we are taking to help meet society's needs for more and cleaner energy," they told AFP.
BP, ExxonMobil and Total did not provide comment to AFP.

COP24: Nations strike deal to breathe life into Paris climate treaty

Nations on Sunday struck a deal to breathe life into the landmark 2015 Paris climate treaty after marathon UN talks that failed to match the ambition the world's most vulnerable countries need to avert dangerous global warming.
Delegates from nearly 200 states finalised a common rule book designed to deliver the Paris goals of limiting global temperature rises to well below two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit).
"Putting together the Paris agreement work programme is a big responsibility," said COP24 president Michal Kurtyka as he gavelled through the deal after talks in Poland that ran deep into overtime.
"It has been a long road. We did our best to leave no one behind." But states already dealing with devastating floods, droughts and extreme weather made worse by climate change said the package agreed in the mining city of Katowice lacked the bold ambition to cut emissions the world needed.
Egyptian ambassador Wael Aboulmagd, chair of a the G77 & China negotiating bloc, said the rule book saw the "urgent adaptation needs of developing countries relegated to a second-class status."
Executive director of Greenpeace Jennifer Morgan said: "We continue to witness an irresponsible divide between the vulnerable island states and impoverished countries pitted against those who would block climate action or who are immorally failing to act fast enough."

The final decision text was repeatedly delayed as negotiators sought guidelines that could ward off the worst threats posed by our heating planet while protecting the economies of rich and poor nations alike.
"Without a clear rulebook, we won't see how countries are tracking, whether they are actually doing what they say they are doing," Canada's Environment Minister Catherine McKenna told AFP.
At their heart, negotiations were about how each nation funds action to mitigate and adapt to climate change, as well as how those actions are reported.
Developing nations wanted more clarity from richer ones over how the future climate fight will be funded and pushed for so-called "loss and damage" measures.
This would see richer countries giving money now to help deal with the effects of climate change many vulnerable states are already experiencing.
Another contentious issue was the integrity of carbon markets, looking ahead to the day when the patchwork of distinct exchanges -- in China, the Europe Union, parts of the United States -- may be joined up in a global system.
The Paris Agreement calls for setting up a mechanism to guard against practices, such as double counting emissions savings, that could undermine such a market. A major sticking point, delegates eventually agreed Saturday to kick the issue down the road until next year.
One veteran observer told AFP Poland's presidency at COP24 had left many countries out of the process and presented at-risk nations with a "take it or leave it" deal.
Progress had "been held up by Brazil, when it should have been held up by the small islands. It's tragic." One of the largest disappointments for countries of all wealths and sizes was the lack of ambition to reduce emissions shown in the final COP24 text.
Most nations wanted the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to form a key part of future planning.
It highlighted the need to slash carbon pollution by nearly half before 2030 in order to hit the 1.5C target. But the US, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Kuwait objected, leading to watered-down wording.
The final statement from the Polish COP24 presidency welcomed "the timely conclusion" of the report and invited "parties to make use of it" -- hardly the ringing endorsement many nations had called for.
"There's been a shocking lack of response to the 1.5 report," Greenpeace's Morgan, told AFP. "You can't come together and say you can't do more!" UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who made three trips to Katowice over the course of the talks, said the world's climate fight was just beginning.
"From now on my five priorities will be: Ambition, ambition, ambition, ambition, ambition," he said in a message read out by UN climate chief Patricia Espinosa.
With the political climate process well into its third decade sputtering on as emissions rise remorselessly, activists have stepped up grassroots campaigns of civil disobedience to speed up action.
"We are not a one-off protest, we are a rebellion," a spokesman for the Extinction Rebellion movement, which disrupted at least one ministerial event at the COP, told AFP.
"We are organising for repeated disruption, and we are targeting our governments, calling for the system change needed to deal with the crisis that we are facing.

Climate talks between 200 nations begin in Poland with boost from G-20 meet

Negotiators from around the world began two weeks of talks on curbing climate change Sunday, three years after sealing a landmark deal in Paris that set a goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
Envoys from almost 200 nations gathered in Poland's southern city of Katowice, a day earlier than originally planned, for the UN meeting that's scheduled to run until December 14.

Ministers and some heads of government are joining in Monday, when host Poland will push for a joint declaration to ensure a "just transition" for fossil fuel industries like coal producers who are facing closures as part of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The meeting received a boost over the weekend, after 19 major economies at the G-20 summit affirmed their commitment to the 2015 Paris climate accord. The only holdout was the United States, which announced under President Donald Trump that it is withdrawing from the climate pact.
"Despite geopolitical instability, the climate consensus is proving highly resilient," said Christiana Figueres, a former head of the UN climate office.
"It is sad that the federal administration of the United States, a country that is increasingly feeling the full force of climate impacts, continues to refuse to listen to the objective voice of science when it comes to climate change," Figures said.
She cited a recent expert report warning of the consequences of letting average global temperatures rise beyond 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F).
"The rest of the G-20 have not only understood the science, they are taking actions to both prevent the major impacts and strengthen their economies," said Figueres, who now works with Mission 2020, a group that campaigns to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The meeting in Katowice is regarded as a key test of countries' willingness to back their lofty but distant goals with concrete measures, some of which are already drawing fierce protests . At the top of the agenda is the so-called Paris rulebook , which will determine how governments record and report their greenhouse emissions and efforts to cut them.
Separately, negotiators will discuss ramping up countries' national emissions targets after 2020, and financial support for poor nations that are struggling to adapt to climate change.
The shift away from fossil fuels, which scientists say has to happen by 2050, is expected to require a major overhaul of world economies.
"The good news is that we do know a lot of what we need to be able to do to get there," said David Waskow of the World Resources Institute.
Waskow, who has followed climate talks for years, said despite the Trump administration's refusal to back this global effort the momentum is going in the right direction.
"It's not one or two players anymore in the international arena," he said. "It's what I think you could call a distributed leadership, where you have a number of countries some of them small or medium-sized really making headway and doing it in tandem with cities and states and businesses."
Later Sunday, protests were planned by environmental activists calling for an end to coal mining in Poland, which gets some 80 per cent of its energy from coal.
Katowice is at the heart of Poland's coal mining region of Silesia and there are still several active mines in and around the city.
On Saturday, thousands of people marched in Berlin and Cologne to demand that Germany speed up its exit from coal-fired power plants.

US deals a small blow to Paris climate change agreement before key meeting

The US has struck a small blow at the Paris Agreement days before the high-level annual climate change negotiations kick-off at Katowice, Poland. In a UN report on climate finance, it has forced the scrubbing of all explicit references to the responsibility of developed countries for providing funds and resources to the developing countries for tackling climate change.
The report called the ‘2018 Biennial Assessment and Overview of Climate Finance Flows’ is to be presented before countries gathering at the Katowice negotiations starting December 2.
The report, prepared every two years, helps with the measurement, reporting and verification of financial support provided to developing countries. The mandate for such a report comes from the existing obligations of developed countries under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Cancun Agreements and the Paris Agreement. Developed countries are obligated to provide funds, as historically they were primarily responsible for climate change. Under the Paris Agreement developed countries are necessarily required to provide enhanced and additional funding while developing countries can do add to the funds voluntarily.
But at a recent meeting in Bonn between October 28 and 30, the US blocked the approval of the report by claiming that the terms ‘developed countries’ and ‘developing countries’ were not defined clearly to identify how climate finance flows between the two sets of countries.
The US, at first, demanded that the report be approved only after inserting a caveat that there was no agreement on the meaning and definition of the phrases ‘developed and developing countries’. This meant, it said, one could not map which country belongs to which category when measuring fund flow. By implication, it would have meant that there was no credible way to measure how much funds developed countries are providing to developing countries.
When developing countries’ representatives vehemently argued against this, the US instead asked for scrubbing out all references to ‘flows from developed countries’. It asked that the term ‘climate finance providers’ be used—which could imply both developed and developing countries. In other places in the report it insisted that the report cite only hyper-technical terms to classify countries. These terms, such as ‘Countries that are not members of the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’, developing country representatives at the meeting warned, would render the report unreadable.
But as the report had to be approved by consensus, developing countries were wary of a US veto and settled for what they considered lesser of the two evils: not explicitly opening the classification of ‘developing and developed countries’ to review.
“That would have meant leaving the door open for countries such as the US to wreck parts of the Paris Agreement from the inside out at a later stage. Given the options, it was better to be hyper-technical, avoid opening the phrases to definitional challenge and pay the relatively much smaller price of the report being less reader-friendly,” said a developing country negotiator aware of the arguments.
The previous iteration of the Biennial Assessment and Overview of Climate Finance Flow in 2016 and 2014 had explicitly talked of and calculated the funds flowing from developed to developing countries. The US had not objected to the use of these phrases at that time.
Business Standard reviewed the 2018 draft report which had dozens of explicit reference to the developed and developing countries and the financial flows from the former to the latter. It reviewed the note that the US initially insisted upon as a caveat. A video recording of the meeting of what is called the Standing Committee on Finance were also reviewed to understand how different regional and country representatives argued over the US’ insertion and how a compromise was reached deleting the reference to developed and developing countries in the approved report.
Video recordings show, during the negotiations one developing country negotiator said, “We cannot sit here rewrite the convention, rewrite the Paris Agreement and rewrite every (decision) of Conference of Parties since Cancun (in 2010) including the one in Durban which created the Green Climate Fund at the whims of the members of the board here. Let us not waste our time on a definition as basic as developing and developed countries.”
Another developing country representative added, “We are running a risk here that we may not have a Biennial Assessment. Is it really worth jeopardising the whole thing for this? Please think about it.
But the US did not relent. The meeting concluded without a finalised report, which had to be negotiated later over emails between members of the Standing Committee on Finance with the US getting its way--the explicit reference to developed country finance obligations were scrubbed out.
The draft report had read in one place, “The 2018 Biennial Assessment provides an updated overview of current climate finance flows over the years 2015 and 2016 from developed to developing countries, available information on domestic climate finance and South-South cooperation, as well as other climate-related flows that constitute global total climate finance flows.’
In the finalised report that paragraph has been replaced by, “The 2018 Biennial Assessment provides an updated overview of current climate finance flows over the years 2015 and 2016 from provider to beneficiary countries, available information on domestic climate finance and cooperation among Parties not included in Annex I to the Convention (non-Annex I Parties).”
Such changes have been made across the report.
“We must remember the US has not walked out of the Paris Agreement. It has said it would do so unless it can get the Paris Agreement reworked to its wishes. This is the way the US is trying to achieve that rewriting - making sure only parts of the Agreement it wants to get implemented in letter and spirit and the rest are either diluted or left out in the implementation phase,” another developing country negotiator involved in these negotiations explained.
The finalised report has been been released and will be presented at Katowice along with a draft of decisions to be taken - these too dilute some references to developed countries’ obligations. While the main report would not be open to further negotiations at Katowice, the recommendations are likely to see the debate reignite between developing and developed countries.

Draft report for UN: India set to meet 2 of its 3 Paris Agreement goals

India is well on the trajectory to achieve two of its three commitments under the Paris Agreement ahead of the 2030 deadline, the government is set to inform the global community by December. This assessment forms part of a report that India will submit to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change this year.
The report, called the Second Biennial Update Report, enumerates India’s latest emission data and also what kind of threats the country is already facing from climate change. Business Standard reviewed a draft of the report prepared by the Union environment, forests and climate change ministry. The draft will go through a round of inter-ministerial consultations before it is finalised.

Under the Paris Agreement, India has made three commitments. India’s greenhouse gas emission intensity of its GDP will be reduced by 33-35 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Alongside, 40 per cent of India’s power capacity would be based on non-fossil fuel sources. At the same time, India will create an additional ‘carbon sink’ of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of Co2 equivalent through additional forest and tree cover by 2030.
The report indicates that India is well on way to achieve the target for emission intensity of the economy and share of non-fossil fuel-based power capacity. In fact, at current rates of improvement on both fronts, India could achieve these targets ahead of the 2030 deadline. But the country has so far not been able to make a smooth start towards the target for increasing India’s forest cover in order to create an additional carbon sink.
The report, besides other information, includes how much greenhouse gas emissions India emitted in 2014 and what the growth was relative to 2005 and 2010 levels.
The emission intensity of India’s GDP came down by 21 per cent below 2005 levels by 2014 recording slightly more than 2 per cent annual average improvement in emission intensity. The rate of improvement recorded between 2014-2010 was higher than that recorded between 2005-2010.
Even at this recorded rate, India could reach its Paris Agreement commitment ahead of the 2030 deadline.
The report also looks at the second target -- turning 40 per cent of the power capacity in the country to non-fossil fuel sources by 2030. By March 2018, the report notes, citing Central Electricity Authority India had ensured 35 per cent of its capacity is based on non-fossil fuel base such as renewables, hydroelectricity and nuclear. Another 17-23 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity addition could take India to the target well before 2030.
“After that, the sheer economics will ensure the greening of India’s power sources. We must remember, India did not commit internationally to the renewable energy capacity target. India said, 40 per cent of its capacity would be from non-fossil fuel sources, which includes large hydropower as well as nuclear power,” explained an official.
“Solar prices have come far too low perhaps and will stabilise at a slightly higher benchmark for the investments in the sector to be remunerative, but we are well on our way to the transition now as far as the international targets are concerned,” he added.
The Indian story sours when the report turns to India’s Green India mission. Under the mission, the government is to ensure an additional ‘carbon sink’ of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of Co2 equivalent by greening India’s forests and enhancing the tree cover beyond the forest areas by 2030. On this front, India is receding further from its target rather than improving.
Forests absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and are therefore referred to as carbon sinks. Enhancing the forest cover locks down carbon dioxide into the soil that would otherwise have escaped into the atmosphere and added to the global warming. Many countries have consequently proposed to either reduce the existing rate of deforestation or enhance the rate of increase in their respective forest covers to remove additional levels of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. India has reported an increase in forest cover over the past decade but this includes the enhancement in tree cover outside forest areas as well as increase in plantations and not only assisted regeneration of natural forests.
Data from India’s draft Biennial Update Report shows that the carbon sequestration from forests has actually got worse between 2010-2014. Carbon removed from the atmosphere by forests is included in the emissions inventory as part of a broader category called, “Land use, land-use change, and forestry.” or LULUCF. The draft report pegs the 2014 levels of emission removal by forestry at only 68,215 gigatonnes of Carbon dioxide equivalent as compared to the 200,036 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2010.
But the removal of greenhouse gas emissions from the sub-category ‘croplands’ more than doubled over the same period. This sub-category includes emission removal from agro-forestry and tree cover outside forests. Emissions from croplands were pegged at 248,610 gigatonnes as compared to 110,757 gigatonnes in 2010.
“At the moment India’s Green India Mission is lagging behind, yes,” said another official, wishing to remain anonymous, said. “We would have to think hard on how to get this off ground. We have time but forestry, community rights, growing plantations - all these have deep contested histories in India. We also have a great opportunity going ahead to increase agro-forestry in India,” he added.