The harsh reality is that the consumption of Petroleumdespite the climate crisis that the planet is experiencing, continues to increase. For next year, OPEC says it will increase 2.7%, as long as the war in Ukraine and inflation do not hit the economy more than expected. In any case, there is oil for a while, as is also the case with coal and natural gas, the other fossil fuels responsible for humanity seeing its very survival threatened.
And it is that, to begin with, the big oil companies are simply reluctant to abandon the production of the ‘fuel of the apocalypse’, as it has sometimes been called, and they tenaciously fight initiatives to decarbonize the planet. This is how “they have humanity by the neck”, in the words of the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, so that industry, traffic and the bulk of the economy depend on oil.
It is not a figure of speech. A study by the climate change analysis laboratory Influence Map revealed a few weeks ago that oil companies spend 750 million dollars each year on climate marketing, but, on the other hand, they only plan to allocate 12% of their total investments to decarbonization. In other words, despite repeated announcements about their environmental commitment, the truth is that practice shows that they do not plan to rectify course, at least not immediately.
The ‘Big Oil’s Agenda 2022’ study is the result of analyzing more than 3,000 messages and announcements launched by five of the largest hydrocarbon-producing companies worldwide: the British BP, the Dutch Shell, the French Total and the Americans ExxonMobil and Chevron . 60% of all these messages contained references to environmental commitments. The cost of all these advertisements (in the media, billboards, blogs, social networks, etc.) amounts to 750 million dollars for a single year, according to a “conservative estimate”, says the study.
This data is then compared with what these companies plan to allocate in 2022 to low-carbon activities, and this expense turns out to be just 12% of the total budget for investments in goods of these companies, which ranges between 87,000 and 96,000 million euros. Dollars.
When the authors of the report they asked the companies to provide the data that prove compliance with their environmental commitments, none of them provided itaccording to Faye Holder, a co-author of the report and a researcher at Influence Map.
This contradiction between such an avalanche of pro-climatic messages and anti-climatic actions constitutes, for Holder, a case of greenwashing.
The powerful ‘lobbies’ of the oil companies
And it is that oil companies and gas and coal companies form authentic lobbiesorganized in a disciplined and effective way, which acts to try to minimize the damage caused by the fight against climate change. This was demonstrated, for example, during the last COP26 conference in Glasgow, which brought together the different countries to continue advancing towards decarbonisation.
The largest delegation that was present at that convention did not correspond to any country, no matter how important it was, but to the fossil fuel industry. And it is that, according to the conservation organization Global Witness after consulting the list of attendees, more than 500 people attending COP26 were part of this industry. Their objective, as this entity suspected, was to pressure in favor of the interests of the hydrocarbon companies, for which they considered that they should be prohibited from entering.
The influence of the oil lobby “is one of the main reasons why 25 years of UN climate talks have not led to real cuts in carbon emissions,” said Global Witness spokeswoman Murray. Worthy.
More and more entities are recalling, as a precedent, that the World Health Organization (WHO) did not take tobacco ban seriously until all tobacco industry representatives were excluded from WHO meetingsto which they used to go to relativize and question the dangers of tobacco.
One of the largest oil lobby groups identified at COP26 was the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), whose spokesperson, Alessandre Vitelli, argued that its raison d’être is to “find more efficient means on the market to reduce emissions ” and said that in his organization there are not only fossil fuel companies, but also from other sectors.
Insufficient emissions cut targets
Beyond these industry efforts in the field of public relations and political influence, the truth is that the large companies in the sector have clearly insufficient decarbonisation objectives to achieve the goals set in the Paris Agreement.
This has been revealed by an investigation published in Nature Communications and carried out by the organization Climate Analytics, which has concluded that the decarbonisation scenarios to which companies such as BP, Shell or Equinor have publicly committed themselves are not ambitious enough to prevent the planet warms above 1.5ºC before 2100.
Even the most daring strategy of all those analyzed, that of British Petroleum, results in an average maximum warming of 1.65ºC, too high to respect the Paris Agreements, since, as the researchers affirm, “every fraction of a degree counts”.
The executive director of Climate Analytics, Bill Hare, considers that “it is important not to allow oil companies to establish scenarios that do not meet the requirements of the Paris Agreement.”
As a result of this whole situation, a few days ago 1,000 professionals and 200 organizations in the health sector from around the world, led by the World Health Organization (WHO) itself, signed a appeal to the governments of the planet to urgently approve a Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Fossil Fuelsa figure reminiscent of what was done with nuclear weapons decades ago to limit atomic arsenals.
“The current addiction to fossil fuels is not just an act of environmental vandalism. From a health point of view, it is an act of self-sabotage,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
These professionals and entities recall in their writing that the threat posed by hydrocarbons to human health is not a generic or intangible threat. Quite the contrary. “Air pollution kills more than seven million people a year worldwide”they point out
In short, the dirty energy industry seems to be doing everything possible to hinder its withdrawal and reconversion towards sustainable sources. The challenge for humanity is to accelerate the transition to an energy future without oil, gas or coal.
Antonio Guterres: “The same tactics as the tobacco companies a few decades ago”
The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, is one of the main voices against the domination that oil companies and other dirty energy industries still exercise over the planet. This summer, during a summit held in June with the main world leaders, he did not hesitate to launch a clear scolding: “You represent the largest economies and also the largest emitters in the world. Your first duty is to protect people. And nothing is clearer than the danger of the expansion of fossil fuels, ”said Guterres in his intervention at the Forum of the Major Economies on Energy and Climate.
Guterres also denounced the pressures that the gas, oil and coal industry exert on governments and economies: “It seems that fossil fuel producers have humanity by the throat”, he said, adding that these pressures are “the same outrageous tactics that Big Tobacco used decades ago”. Just like the tobacco industry, the lobby of fossil fuels and their financial accomplices must not escape responsibility”, added the Secretary General of the UN. With these last words, he alluded to the fact that the big banks on the planet continue to finance dirty energies with large sums of money, without which their survival would not be possible.
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