Climate and Energy

CEO's work exposes the corporate capture of EU and international climate policies. It shows how corporate lobbying has resulted in a combination of weak CO2 reduction measures, the dominance of carbon markets and other false solutions such as agrofuels, nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. These false solutions might be convenient for governments as they fit with the dominant ideology that business must be allowed to profit from the solutions, but they do not result in benefits  for people or the environment.

Large corporations and their lobby groups, such as the European employers confederation BusinessEurope and the chemical lobby CEFIC, are effectively blocking the rise of the current inadequate emissions reduction target (20% reduction by 2020 with a 1990 baseline). They continue to produce excessive emissions and to profit from the carbon market.

Corporate lobby groups are also partly responsible for the failure of UN climate negotiations. The last few years have seen the gradual abandonment of a system of binding (if weak) emissions reductions targets for industrialised countries established under the Kyoto Protocol. Instead a system of voluntary pledges is emerging, combined with an expansion of carbon markets to areas such as forests and CCS. This approach will not avert climate change. CEO exposes how big business have succeeded in playing a bigger role on these negotiations, ensuring greater involvement in the design of the international climate architecture.

CEO works with other groups in Europe to challenge the corporate capture of EU decision-making on climate policies and to promote alternatives to carbon trading. We are also part of Climate Justice Now! (CJN!), a network of organisations and movements from across the globe committed to the fight for social, ecological and gender justice.

Broad awareness and collective mobilisation and pressure to demand real change are needed to force the EU to abandon false solutions and adopt effective and just climate policies.

Rio+20: the financialisation of nature

In 2012, the UN is organising its third summit on Sustainable Development, 20 years after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Corporate groups and powerful governments and blocks like the EU are promoting their new buzzword, the green economy. Although this sounds like a good thing, the green economy is promoting the financialisation of nature.

It implies expanding carbon markets, in spite of their evident failure, to other areas such as biodiversity or water. This means that nature is transformed into quantifiable units such as certificates, that can be traded and profited from. And that they can be subjected to financial speculation, in the search for maximum profits. It might also justify the destruction of nature in one place as long as this is 'compensated for' with the 'protection' of nature elsewhere. This is against all common sense, but big investors and corporations are looking for new markets where they can invest and maximise profits after the collapse of more conventional markets after the financial crisis.

CEO shows how corporate lobby groups such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) are using their privileged access to the Commission in order for the EU to further their interests in the Rio+20 negotiations and beyond.

This will further the privatization of nature, benefitting only a small minority and will not change the current model of consumption and production, therefore not helping to solve the environmental crisis. And it will certainly not benefit the poor.

CEO works with other groups to prevent this neoliberal approach from being greenwashed as an effective way to protect nature.