Similarly, the big four professional services companies – Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PWC – all make fortunes helping the fossil fuel industry. While they generally talk a good game on climate action, in reality, they aren’t in the business of putting major clients out of business.
Extraction
Together, these firms produce a vast economic interest vested in the status quo, a hulk of power that is perhaps bigger in London than almost any other city on earth.
The UK hosts two of the world’s six oil ‘supermajors’, all four of the Big Four professional services companies, one of the world’s main oil exchanges and many of the banks financing the oil industry – including Barclays.
It’s now twelve years since Carbon Tracker first released its iconic “Unburnable carbon” report, setting out how these firms all have “stranded assets” which mean they should be insolvent.
It’s been ten years since the Paris climate conference. The world around us is heating uncontrollably, and yet all of these companies continue to invest in or otherwise support fossil fuel extraction.
Many (though not all) are involved in new fossil fuel exploration and extraction. In a world where the carbon in the already known reserves of our oil giants is enough to trash the climatic conditions which allowed civilisation to emerge; they are hunting for more.
Corporate
If the government is serious about delivering the transformation needed to deliver action on climate change, it needs to be able to stand up to this vast lobby. Instead, it has made itself subservient to it.
UK government departments each have a board of directors, made up of ministers, senior civil servants and a group of non-executive directors.
These boards set departmental strategy, and hold officials accountable. The non-executive directors are there, supposedly, to bring different perspectives and independent thinking into the department. There are, on average, four for each department.
But when I went through the list of all of them, and read through their CVs, one really depressing trend became clear. Two thirds of them come from backgrounds as corporate executives. Some of these people come straight from big polluters.
Dr Brian Gilvary, the chairman of the petrochemical giant Ineos, and semi-retired after a career at the top of BP, is on the board of the Ministry of Defence.
Risk
The British Airways executive who oversees its corporate communications – including its lobbying team – is on the board of the Cabinet Office, the central government department.
BA’s parent company has been found to be leading lobbying efforts against environmental regulation of the aviation industry.
Step beyond government departments to other public bodies, and you find more. The chairman of Shell is also chair of UK Research and Innovation, the national funding agency responsible for investing in science and research in the UK.
But more often, non-executive directors come from that wider world of businesses bound to the fossil economy. Current or former staff at or advisers to major professional services companies spill out across government boards.
For example, the group risk officer, the senior adviser to the CEO, and the senior independent director of Barclays are all non-executive directors of government departments.
Polluters
Partly this is a problem because of how they will do their work overseeing departments. There is no suggestion that any of these people has personally profited from their role, beyond the £15-20,000 paycheque. But it’s more insidious than that, isn’t it?
Often, a conflict of interest doesn’t come in the form of anything you say. It doesn’t have to come in the form of what you think. It can stem from what you don’t say, what you don’t even think to say.
Are people heavily bound into the carbon economy really applying the pressure departments need to feel if they’re going to deliver the transition we need over the next four years?
Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace, told The Ecologist: “It’s hard to believe the government can be serious about cutting carbon and boosting nature recovery when so many of the people charged with holding it to account come straight from the boardrooms of the biggest polluters, lobbyists and financiers.
“If ministers want sound advice and constructive challenge on how to keep their promises, they should bring in climate scientists, independent experts and voices from communities on the frontline of the climate crisis.
Insights
“Privileged access for a cosy corporate club that has much to gain from slowing down climate action appears shady to put it mildly.”
The problem will also come from the things that non-exec directors learn from their roles.
For example, multiple government departments have people connected to PriceWaterhouseCooper on their boards.
PWC sells insights to the oil and gas industry, helping it remain profitable. Where does it get those ‘insights’? It’s fair to assume that one place they come from is its various close connections with the government.
Excluded
In Australia in 2022, PWC was busted passing government secrets to clients to help them avoid tax. There’s no suggestion anything like that is going on here.
But it doesn’t have to be, does it? You don’t need to share secrets to be able to use the wisdom gained from being on an organisation’s board to better understand it, and so be able to advise clients on how to navigate it.
It matters which networks of people know how to navigate the labyrinthine corridors of power. Inviting big polluters and their agents into Whitehall ensures that’s who knows their way around.
The overall effect, as Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party, put it to me, is that ordinary people “have been largely excluded” from the upper layers of government.
Oversee
The idea that departments have boards of directors is, in itself, a weird part of Westminster’s undemocracy. But if we must have it, then the government should be using it to boost the voices of the poorest and most marginalised – the people too often talked over in democratic debate, not to further promote the voices of those doing the talking-over.
If the government wanted to prioritise the needs of the most impoverished and marginalised communities, it would make its departments accountable to them, or even just those who know their struggles.
The Scottish government, for example, chose the chair of the Citizens’ Advice Bureau as a non-executive director. If the government really thought decarbonisation was its priority it would appoint climate scientists, and representatives of the frontline communities being most impacted by climate breakdown.
Instead, most of the people appointed to oversee government departments come from the very industries destroying the planet. And if that doesn’t change, don’t expect much else to.
This Author
Adam Ramsay is an investigative journalist and writes the Abolish Westminster newsletter.
This article has been published through the Ecologist Writers’ Fund. We ask readers for donations to pay some authors £250 for their work. Please make a donation now. You can learn more about the fund, and make an application, on our website.