Every year, United Nations member states gather together at the Conference of the Parties, better known as COP, to negotiate international climate agreements and assess global progress toward emissions reduction. The 30th annual COP will begin November 7 in Belém, Brazil, a city of about 2.5 million on the edge of the Amazon. Depending on who you ask, COP is either the world’s best attempt to date at collective climate action or a massive forum for greenwashing: At last year’s COP29, the human rights NGO Global Witness found that oil and gas lobbyists significantly outnumbered negotiating officials from the 10 countries most threatened by climate change.
“We genuinely believe that COPs have been co-opted by the fossil fuel industry, to such an extent that we’re seeing thousands of lobbyists turn up each year,” said Patrick Galey, the head of fossil fuel investigations at Global Witness. “And they are not lobbying for green energy.”
One long-running argument for giving oil and gas companies a seat at the table at COP has been that, as the providers of the lion’s share of the world’s energy, they must be partners in global decarbonization. “Coalitions have to include the incumbent energy companies, and specifically the oil and gas companies,” Ernest Moniz, who was energy secretary under former president Barack Obama, told CNBC at COP28 in 2023.
But a new study in the academic journal Nature Sustainability appears to bolster Galey’s side of the argument, by demonstrating exactly how little fossil fuel companies are investing in renewable energy. The study’s authors analyzed data from Global Energy Monitor, an open source database that tracks oil, gas, coal, and renewable energy use worldwide, to figure out just how involved major fossil fuel companies are in the deployment of renewables.
The researchers fully expected measures of fossil fuel producers’ investment in renewable energy to be low — but not this low: Of the 250 largest oil and gas companies, they found, only 20 percent were operating any renewable energy projects at all. Overall, fossil fuel producers own only 1.42 percent of global renewable energy projects, and those projects are responsible for a measly 0.1 percent of their total energy production.
Marcel Llavero Pasquina, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona who authored the study along with Antonio Bontempi, admits that he was surprised by how little renewable energy activity is supported by oil and gas companies, despite going into the research with low expectations. “They’ve been hammering this message that they are part of the transition, that they are an ally in the fight against the climate crisis for so long,” he told Grist. “I was expecting [oil and gas companies to own] around 5 percent.”
Llavaero Pasquina said that he hoped his research would be used to support excluding fossil fuel producers from any role in setting international climate goals.
The research comes as the World Meteorological Association announces that planet-warming carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have reached record highs this year. It also arrives on the heels of the oil major BP’s decision, earlier this year, to cut renewable energy investment by roughly 70 percent.
“We continually see fossil fuel producers over-promise and under-deliver when it comes to renewable energy spending,” said Galey from Global Witness. “Every COP we have that continues to allow thousands of people who are advocating for the continued use of oil and gas puts the Paris Agreement goals further out of reach. Every COP we allow them to infiltrate incurs a debt to future generations that will be paid in climate impacts.”