New Report Details Big Oil's $500 Million Annual Climate Obstructionism

The dark channels through which corporations influence legislation are notoriously hard to trace, but a new detailed report estimates that the world’s largest fossil fuel companies are spending upwards of $500 million per year to obstruct climate laws.

“There’s a shamelessness here that hopefully will be harder to maintain in the full light of day.”
—Bill McKibbenPublished Thursday by the UK-based non-profit InfluenceMap, the report (pdf) looked at two fossil fuel giants (ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell) and three trade lobbying groups, discovering that all together the five companies spend $114 million dollars a year to defeat climate change legislation.

More significantly, InfluenceMap says, “Extrapolated over the entire fossil fuel and other industrial sectors beyond, it is not hard to consider that this obstructive climate policy lobbying spending may be in the order of $500m annually.”

“It’s remarkably useful to see exactly how much Exxon and its brethren are still spending to bend the climate debate,” responded (pdf) Bill McKibben of 350.org in a statement. “There’s a shamelessness here that hopefully will be harder to maintain in the full light of day.”

The group drew particular attention to the sinister lobbying group American Petroleum Institute (API), “one of the best funded and most consistently obstructive lobbying forces for climate policy in the United States,” as InfluenceMap notes: