Statement of Resource Person, Dylan Tanner
6 November 2018
way.46 Carbon Majors who hold or have held leadership positions in
CEMBUREAU include Cemex, HeidlbergCement, Italcementi and
LafargeHolcim.
InfluenceMap’s detailed tracking of lobbying to water down the EU
ETS, focused between 2012-2018, implicates various Carbon Major
companies either directly or through their trade groups including: BP,
Cemex,
Eni,
ExxonMobil,
HeidelbergCement,
Italcementi,
LafargeHolcim, Lukoil, OMV, Repsol, Rio Tinto, Royal Dutch Shell
and Total.
b. The undermining of US climate policy and the successful halting of the
US Clean Power Plan by corporate-led lawsuits, 2000-2018.
In addition to the well documented efforts by powerful US fossil fuel
companies to seed doubt around climate science 47 , the same
interests have repeatedly and successfully challenged efforts to develop
robust policy on greenhouse gas emissions in the country. As Robert
Brulle points out in his 2018 analysis of US corporate climate lobbying,
“Despite the introduction of several major bills to limit carbon
emissions in the USA, none of them have been passed.48 ” Indeed,
without timely interventions from fossil fuel interests on two early US
policy developments, the country could have taken a very different –
and perhaps transformative – role in global efforts to tackle climate
change. This has been widely researched with some results noted.
Documents obtained by freedom of information request in 200549,
demonstrate how Exxon and the Global Climate Coalition heavily
advised the Bush administration on climate policy between 2001-2004,
during which time the US withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol and sought
not to regulate GHG emissions under the Clean Air Act.
•
The extensive lobbying efforts from fossil fuel interests on the ‘capand trade’ regulation proposed in the 2009 Waxman-Markey Bill has
been found by studies to be one of the primary reasons for its defeat50.
•
During the Obama Administration’s second term in 2015, the
Environmental Protection Agency finalized a new, broad-ranging effort
to tackle greenhouse gas emissions called the Clean Power Plan
(henceforth referred to as the ‘Plan’). In this Plan, greenhouse gases
46
The EU ETS and the European Cement Industry: A decade of lobbying and distortion, InfluenceMap, February 2017
47
Assessing ExxonMobil's climate change communications, G Supran & N Oreskes, Environmental Research Letters, August, 2017
48
The climate lobby: a sectoral analysis of lobbying spending on climate change in the USA, 2000 to 2016, Robert Brulle, pringer Nature B.V. 2018,
49
Revealed: how oil giant influenced Bush, The Guardian, June 2005
50
Business actors, political resistance, and strategies for policymakers., Downie C ,2017, Energy Policy 108:583–592
12