There are more fossil fuel lobbyists at COP27 than there are delegates from 10 of the most climate-impacted nations combined, according to a new report from three NGOs. “If you want to address malaria, you don’t invite the mosquitoes,” said Phillip Jakpor, who’s from Nigeria and works with Public Participation Africa, told BBC.
One year after 503 fossil fuel lobbyists attended COP26, — during which tropical cyclones pummeled southeastern Africa, extreme heat broiled South Asia and Great Britain, floods devastated eastern South Africa and Pakistan, and the IPCC concluded fossil fuel use must be immediately phased out — that number has increased to 636. Two hundred fossil fuel lobbyists are members of official national delegations; BP CEO Bernard Looney was registered as a delegate of Mauritania. The oil and gas industry is aggressively seeking to increase extraction from Africa, something advocates deride as simply perpetuating centuries of the Global North’s exploitation of the continent’s resources with little to no regard for its people.
“The fossil fuel industry, their agenda, it’s deadly,” Rachel Rose Jackson of Corporate Accountability, and a co-author of the report, told BBC. “Their motivation is profit and greed. They’re not serious about climate action. They never have been and they never will.” (BBC, Washington Post $, The Guardian, Context, OilPrice, Democracy Now, The Guardian, explainer; Looney: BBC)