Big Oil and the US Elections Background With the exception of France’s Total, the oil majors’ climate lobbying expenditures are geographically weighted towards the United States. One explanation is that the United States, in particular its shale fields, have become of increasing strategic importance in corporate investment plans. A further explanation is that the legal framework structuring the way companies spend on lobbying and politics in the US enables far greater levels of effective spending than the other regions included in the survey (Europe, Canada, Australia). US corporate political spending has received increasing political and media attention in 2019. In light of this concern, the US political contributions from the five oil majors since 1990 are listed below, with data from opensecrets.org. Organization Aggregated US Political Donations since 1990 $28,436,617 $20,980,168 $8,583,322 $3,310,304 $380,285 (since 2000) Under the 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act, lobbying disclosures require the linkage of money spent to a particular policy agenda such as climate change (although the positions taken do not need to be disclosed). However, disclosure of this targeted policy agenda is not generally required under US Federal campaign finance laws pertaining to political contributions. Furthermore, research by US watchdog the Centre of Responsive Politics reveals significant amounts of US political contributions do not even fully disclosure their ultimate donors. 6 Political contributions that were made without full disclosure of their ultimate source totaled $539M in the 2018 election cycle according to opensecrets.org. Given these limitations in ascertaining targeted policy agenda and ultimate donors, this research does take into account such political donations. InfluenceMap does recognize that this influencing and spending could be highly significant to the overall climate-influencing strategies of the oil majors and their agents. 6 Center for Responsive Politics, State of Money in Politics: Billion-dollar ‘dark money’ spending is just the tip of the iceberg, February 2019 17 InfluenceMap March 2019