How Big Oil and Financial Markets Captured The U.N. Climate Agenda
Exxon established the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), which spent millions of dollars campaigning against a binding global climate agreement ahead of the 1997 UN climate summit in Kyoto, which influenced the US Congress to not ratify the Kyoto climate agreement. Exxon later lobbied the Bush administration to pull out of the protocol altogether, which undermined global efforts to act against greenhouse gas emissions.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol regulated greenhouse gas reductions for a limited group of countries from 2008 to 2012. The protocol was extended until 2020 with the Doha Amendment in 2012.
However, by 2015 the global mood was changing, resulting in the Paris Agreement — a much stronger commitment to limit global warming to between 1.5 degrees, and at most 2 degrees. It was signed by 195 countries.
That an agreement was reached by 195 countries to limit global warming to a specific temperature was a clear message to the fossil fuel industry that the world was ‘aligned’ on the need to act on climate change, and the U.N. climate conferences were leading that global alignment.
The fossil fuel industry realised that they needed to seriously increase their funding of climate communications and lobbying if they hoped to delay systemic change.
