Corporate role in climate talks disputed
Developing nations and environmental groups are challenging some of the world’s biggest companies and wealthiest countries over the role corporate lobbyists play in United Nations climate change negotiations.
The dispute opens an additional battle in the struggle over how to fashion a global response to climate change, one that corporate interests appear to be winning, for now.
Though companies are not permitted to participate directly in the climate talks, representatives from almost 300 industry groups are free to roam the negotiations in Bonn, Germany, as “stakeholders,” and to lobby negotiators on behalf of corporations that may seek to slow action, the developing nations and their allies say.
Negotiators from Uganda, Ecuador, the Philippines
and other countries have proposed guidelines on lobbying and conflicts of interest that could help curb the corporate presence at the talks. Rules that reduced the role of cigarette companies in the global treaty on tobacco are a precedent, they say.
Chebet Maikut, the delegate for Uganda, an East African country recently hit by drought, argued that undue corporate influence could derail the talks by weakening or delaying emissions goals.
“These corporations are so powerful,” Maikut said. Uganda’s economy is less than a tenth of the market capitalization of the fossil fuel giant Exxon Mobil, for example.
“We need a stronger
rule book,” he said.
The Paris climate deal, reached in 2015, commits nearly every country to lowering planet-warming gas emissions to stave off the most severe effects of global warming.
But just how to do this needs to be worked out in a series of negotiations.
At a heated session at the latest round of talks on Tuesday, delegates from the United States, Russia and Australia made a last-minute defense of the corporate presence, suggesting that a wider discussion of the issue be delayed.
A U.S. delegate argued that it would be “premature” to continue the discussion over corporate participation at the meeting, said someone at the session, which was abruptly closed to outside observers. The talks risked becoming “an endless ideas factory,” the U.S. delegate said.
After four hours of debate, delegates agreed to call for suggestions from member nations on how to address the issue, and to take them up next year.
Outside the negotiations, a handful of protesters held signs that read, “Stop Corporate Capture” and “Polluters Out, People In.”
Some environmental groups have argued that the Paris accord does not go far enough, having been watered down by corporate interests that opposed stronger emissions restrictions.
More recently, talks about next steps have been overshadowed by the specter of the Trump administration abandoning the deal. That is a move even corporations have warned against. Last week, the chief executives of 30 large U.S. companies, including Dow Chemical Co. and agricultural giant Cargill, took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal expressing their “strong support” for U.S. participation in the agreement.
But there may be more to American companies’ support of the Paris process than meets the eye, corporate accountability watchdogs say.
American corporations have a strong, self-serving motive for urging the United States not to withdraw, said Tamar Lawrence-Samuel, policy director at Corporate Accountability International, which campaigns against corporate influence in public policy.
“It makes complete sense to be at the policymaking table than to be on the outside,” Lawrence-Samuel said.
The tussle over corporate influence is occurring at a delicate time. With the overall deal ratified, nations are now hashing out exactly how they will meet the goal of limiting global warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the preindustrial level.