Since 1988, Big Oil Has Been At The Heart Of IPCC Process, Moving Goalposts & Generating Disinfo

[hatrack]

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By 1988, a handful of oil companies and trade groups were involved in the IPCC process. Their numbers grew every year, as did their prominence, and they moved from being observers and reviewers to authors. By 1998, Brian Flannery, a former climate modeller and then manager at ExxonMobil and a key part of the company’s shift from researching climate change to casting doubt on climate science, was lead author of the “Working Group III” assessment in the IPCC’s third report. The group works on mitigation – actually reducing CO2 emissions – definitely not something you want an Exxon guy in charge of, especially during the company’s peak climate-denial years. Flannery took the lead on Working Group III for the fourth report, too, which was published in 2007.

In the 20 years between the UNCHE and the 1992 Rio Earth summit, which was the precursor to what we now call the Conference of Parties or COP events, the business community fully infiltrated international discussions on environmental issues and successfully moved the goalposts. Gone was the emphasis on government regulation, replaced by a sort of big-tent approach that included business interests and prioritised compromise. “Some enlightened leaders of enterprises are already implementing ‘responsible care’ and product stewardship policies and programmes,” Agenda 21, one of the defining documents to come out of the 1992 Rio summit, noted approvingly. “A positive contribution of business and industry, including transnational corporations, to sustainable development can increasingly be achieved by using economic instruments such as free market mechanisms.”

That shift in tone, from regulation in 1972 to compromise in 1992, is a crucial one, because the Rio Earth summit also produced the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), which informed the creation of the IPCC and its reports, as well as every international climate agreement since. In contrast to the 1972 convening, the UN encouraged business-community participation in 1992 – and industry groups were happy to comply. They drafted their own “sustainable development charter” to bring to Rio.

“And as you can imagine, this charter did not contain anything that would have really transformed how companies did business,” Aronczyk says. “It was a very business-as-usual document, but it paid a lot of lip service to the idea of going green, of being sustainable, being very concerned about the environment. And because they got out in front of the actual conference, they were really able to put that document forward and stave off other kinds of more binding legislation or more draconian regulations that would have caused problems for these companies’ profits.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/07/climate-solutions-big-oil-ipcc-report

[Magoo48]

1. The big oil, corporate, morbidly rich--maddened by greed, will willfully drive us to extinction.