Organisers of the COP21 UN climate conference and environmentalists are deeply divided over the role of the fossil fuel industry.
A group of NGOs submitted a petition yesterday to Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
It wants big polluters to be “kicked out” of climate policy-making in much the same way that a firewall was established between public health officials and the tobacco industry.
Activists question Figueres’s impartiality. She was climate change adviser to Latin America’s largest energy company, Endesa, before she became the UN climate chief in 2010, and strongly believes in working with the fossil fuel industry.
Figueres's spokesman Nick Nuttall, said it was "totally unfair" to reproach her for having worked for Endesa.
He acknowledged that Figueres “will constantly try to engage with the fossil fuel industry”.
“We have to deal with the reality of the world in which we live, and therefore we have to deal with the reality of the corporations that operate on this planet, and bring them all in common cause towards bringing down emissions.
Lobbying
“COP21 shows just how close business is to governments and the UNFCCC,” says Pascoe Sabido, researcher and campaigner for the Brussels-based Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO). Sabido holds a degree in environmental studies and development from the London School of Economics and is attending COP21.
Sabido says through active lobbying in the run-up to the climate conference, businesses “have transformed their image from being the problem to being the solution, which is a miraculous PR job”.
A pamphlet published by the CEO defines “greenwashing” as “companies that pollute the planet, destroy the climate and the means of subsistence of the populations affected, while at the same time declaring themselves to be friends of the environment and promoters of social progress”.
Some 40 corporate sponsors have contributed €26 million to the French government’s €187 million budget for COP21. Their logos are displayed throughout the conference site. Environmentalists particularly object to the presence of Air France, the mostly state-owned electricity company EDF, the gas company Engie and BNP Paribas bank.
Aviation is the fastest growing sector for emissions, and Air France, along with the International Air Transport Association IATA, lobbies against stricter climate regulations.
EDF is a giant in nuclear power. Sabido says, contrary to its claims, nuclear power is not a low-carbon industry.
Engie is deeply involved in the coal and gas industry, and lobbies for the development of shale gas and oil in France.
Fossil fuel companies now claim that natural gas, including shale gas released by hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” is “low carbon”.
Not so, says Sabido. Methane leakage from gas is more destructive to the atmosphere than coal.
Power plants
There has been a rush by banks and other investors to get out of coal. However, BNP Paribas – a sponsor of COP21 – persists. The Pinocchio Climate Awards, organised by Friends of the Earth France, cites BNP Paribas’s role in the construction of the Medupi and Kusile coal-fired power plants in South Africa. “Together they will emit 60 million tonnes of carbon every year, increasing South Africa’s greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent,” notes the group’s website.
Sabido predicts that the “carbon bubble” will burst in spectacular fashion, not unlike the housing bubble in 2008. “If 80 per cent of fossil fuels have to be left in the ground, assets will lose all their value.”
Last Monday, the first day of COP21, the Euronext stock market launched a “Low Carbon 100 Europe” index that ranks the 100 most ecological companies.
To improve their image and forestall disinvestment, companies including BP, Shell, Statoil, Total and Saudi Aramco launched their Oil and Gas Climate Initiative at the UN in September 2014.
The French oil company Total was centre stage at a business and climate summit at Unesco last May. But the two largest oil companies in the US, ExxonMobil and and Chevron, want no part of "greenwashing".
"We don't intend to participate in that coalition," Chevron's chairman John Watson told a shareholders' meeting in May. "We're not going to be disingenuous about it. We're not going to fake it," Exxon chairman Rex Tillerson told reporters in Dallas, also last May.
He strongly implied that his European competitors were “faking” their newfound ecological fervour.
For environmentalists such as Sabido, the presence of a “Gallery of Solutions” – a business trade show – at COP21, and “Solutions COP21,” which will open at the Grand Palais in central Paris today, are further examples of greenwashing. For fees ranging from €30,000 to €250,000, companies can display their climate change credentials before the public.
Defence systems
Some 200 companies from 17 countries are exhibiting at the Gallery of Solutions.
Thales, a French company which specialises in defence systems but also in software for civil aircraft, trains and satellites, is at COP21 to explain its research to decrease carbon dioxide emissions by aircraft.
Jui Wen Chen, an inventor from Taiwan, shows his system for filtering carbon dioxide and other pollutants from air and rain water. The system is used in hundreds of towns in Taiwan and the People's Republic.
Environmental groups argue that such innovations are false solutions intended to distract attention from the big polluters.
The question is put to Olivier Lavastre, a French scientist who is working with the Taiwanese company JW Pavement Eco Technology. The battle on climate change must be an accumulation of small steps, he replies. "Little streams come together to make a big river."
