The Role of Trade Associations While the five oil majors may need to have their individual voices heard on climate policy, given their diverse geographic and business portfolio mixes the use of jointly funded trade associations plays a crucial role in lobbying against binding regulations. The importance of this is two-fold. Firstly, as direct opposition by the companies to climate policy becomes increasingly untenable, the use of trade associations to do this work becomes increasingly desirable, as these groups are easier to hide behind and defend. Secondly, a trade group with a mandate to represent the entire sector and the jobs/growth narrative it deploys may be more powerful than a single-company approach. This study looks at the most powerful oil & gas sector trade groups operating in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia. The chart below tracks the money each of the five oil majors contributes towards climate lobbying by their trade groups and how it contributes to these groups’ overall climate lobbying budgets. The American Petroleum Institute clearly dominates in this spending. Detailed summaries of each trade association’s climate lobbying can be found in the Appendix. Trade associations structure their membership and fees depending on the size of a company’s operations in the region they represent. The five oil majors, owing to their economic size, appear likely to dominate the agendas of most if not all groups highlighted above. Their presence represents a global strategic lobbying asset to combat binding regulations deemed a risk to the expansion of fossil fuels. All five oil majors, as truly global firms, have close links to all the trade associations in the flow chart above, with a few exceptions (e.g. Chevron remains outside of FuelsEurope, Total remains outside the WSPA). 14 InfluenceMap March 2019