Other climate battles

Despite the hailed deal to “transition away from fossil fuels”, the 2023 UN climate summit’s text has the oily fingerprints of the fossil fuel lobby all over it. COP28 is more likely to facilitate a fossil fuel frenzy by cementing false solutions.

At a time when the EU needs to be taking unprecedented action to tackle the climate crisis, Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen has shockingly nominated ex-Shell employee and well-known corporate player Wopke Hoekstra as climate commissioner.

The Commission ignored massive conflicts of interest when it hired the world’s biggest asset management fund to investigate the best way to make banking sustainable. “The BlackRock Model”, a report from CEO and Change Finance uncovers the scale of the blunder, and explains why the Commission needs to find a new approach to ‘sustainable finance’.

BlackRock is a major fossil fuel investor. So why has the European Commission given it a key role to provide paid advice on the crucial ‘sustainable finance’ dossier? Documents obtained by Corporate Europe Observatory show the Commission didn’t even consider the conflicts of interest.

They meet at birthday parties, over breakfast meetings, during cocktail receptions; so just how close are Europe’s dirtiest industries to senior politicians and regulators? And what influence is this lobbying having on the EU’s official climate change policy? These are the kind of questions we need to be asking as leaders from the 28 EU member states try to reach agreement on Europe’s climate targets for 2030. This scrutiny is particularly urgent because – as this privileged access might imply – these industries appear to have been extremely successful at watering down EU climate and energy