"Unprecedented" Access For Oil & Gas Lobbyists Over Past Four Climate Summits - This Is What Corprate Capture Looks Like

More than 5,000 fossil fuel lobbyists were given access to the UN climate summits over the past four years, a period marked by a rise in catastrophic extreme weather, inadequate climate action and record oil and gas expansion, new research reveals. Lobbyists representing the interests of the oil, gas and coal industries – which are mostly responsible for climate breakdown – have been allowed to participate in the annual climate negotiations where states are meant to come in good faith and commit to ambitious policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The roughly 5,350 lobbyists mingling with world leaders and climate negotiators in recent years worked for at least 859 fossil fuel organizations including trade groups, foundations and 180 oil, gas and coal companies involved in every part of the supply chain from exploration and production to distribution and equipment, research shared exclusively with the Guardian has found. Just 90 of the fossil fuel corporations that sent lobbyists to climate talks between 2021 and 2024 accounted for more than half (57%) of all the oil and gas produced last year, according to the analysis by Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO), a coalition of 450 organizations campaigning to stop the fossil fuel industry blocking and delaying global climate action.

These corporations, which include many of the world’s most profitable private and publicly owned oil and gas majors, accounted for the production of 33,699m barrels of oil equivalent in 2024 – enough to cover more than the entire area of Spain with a 1cm blanket of oil. The same 90 firms also account for almost two-thirds (63%) of all short-term upstream fossil fuel expansion projects which are gearing up for exploration and production, according to the newly released Global Oil and Gas Exit List – a dataset which includes more than 1,700 companies covering more than 90% of global oil and gas activity.

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On Friday the Exxon CEO, Darren Woods, will headline a Cop30 launch event in Brasília hosted by the US chamber of commerce called Pragmatic Business Solutions for Carbon Accounting and Emission Reductions. The US, which like every state is legally obliged under international law to tackle the climate crisis, has withdrawn from the Paris agreement and is not sending a country delegation to the summit. Petrobas, the majority-state-owned Brazilian multinational which sent at least 28 lobbyists to the past four climate summits, was recently grant ed a licence to conduct exploratory oil drilling in the sea off the Amazon, which is home to multiple Indigenous communities and about 10% of the planet’s known species.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/07/fossil-fuel-lobbyists-cop-un-climate