Egyptian organizers have hired Hill+Knowlton Strategies, a public relations firm that has represented oil giants including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and Saudi Aramco, to manage communications for the COP27 negotiations, according to emails and other materials reviewed by The Climate 202.
Meanwhile, Coca-Cola was selected as a sponsor of the summit, despite the beverage company’s connection to the billions of tons of plastic waste choking the world’s oceans.
Hill+Knowlton has touted its focus on sustainability, while the Egyptian organizers said they chose Coca-Cola because of its commitment to reducing emissions. But environmentalists have slammed the significant role of these companies in the world’s largest annual gathering aimed at spurring greater climate action.
“It’s like putting Philip Morris in charge of tobacco negotiations,” said Jamie Henn, the founder of Clean Creatives, a campaign pressuring PR and advertising agencies to quit working with fossil fuel companies.
In 2017 and 2018, Hill+Knowlton created ads that touted Shell’s efforts to power London’s buses with biodiesel made partly from coffee grounds. “Your coffee can now help power buses: Shell,” the ads said.
And this year, Hill+Knowlton has helped the Egyptian organizers of COP27 hold virtual briefings for journalists, according to an emailed invitation shared with The Climate 202. The briefing featured remarks by Timothy Hurst, a managing director in Hill+Knowlton’s Dubai office, according to a screenshot.
Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard University professor who studies climate disinformation, called it “unconscionable” that the firm is involved with the climate summit, given its work on behalf of Big Tobacco and Big Oil.
“Hill and Knowlton was one of the central players who developed the ‘tobacco playbook,’ which used half-truths and disinformation to discredit the scientific evidence of the harms of smoking,” Oreskes said in an email. “Then that playbook was used for decades by Big Oil to discredit the scientific evidence of the harms of burning fossil fuels. It’s unconscionable to me that COP would hire them to help with climate change PR.”
Hill+Knowlton did not respond to a request for comment. But on its website, the firm says it has launched a strategy “to empower businesses and brands to have a better impact on people and the planet,” drawing on the sustainable development goals of the United Nations.
‘Corporate greenwashing’
In an open letter released Friday morning, more than 400 scientists wrote that Hill+Knowlton’s work for fossil fuel industry clients is “incompatible” with the aims of the COP27 negotiations.
“These clients’ business plans to increase fossil fuel production run counter to the goals of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process to create a just, global process to limit the worst impacts of climate change,” the scientists wrote in the letter, which was organized by Clean Creatives and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The letter comes after the environmental groups Just Zero and Beyond Plastics on Wednesday urged COP27 to drop Coca-Cola as a sponsor.
“COP27 is supposed to focus on solutions for fighting catastrophic climate crisis,” Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former senior Environmental Protection Agency official under President Barack Obama, said in a statement. “Instead, we’re allowing it to be a stage for corporate greenwashing.”
Coca-Cola did not respond to a request for comment. But the company previously told the Associated Press: “Our support for COP27 is in line with our science-based target to reduce absolute carbon emissions 25% by 2030, and our ambition for net zero carbon emissions by 2050.”
The other sponsors of COP27 include IBM, Microsoft, Boston Consulting Group and Vodafone, but they have drawn less criticism for their participation. Microsoft, for its part, has pledged to purchase massive amounts of renewable energy to feed its power-hungry data centers.
Meanwhile, at last year’s COP26 negotiations in Scotland, big oil and gas companies were effectively banned from sponsoring events at the summit after the organizers laid out their criteria. Sponsors had to not only set net-zero targets, which Shell and BP have done, but also show a “credible action plan to achieve this, independently verified through the science-based targets initiative.”
Despite these requirements, the fossil fuel industry ended up sending more delegates to the summit than any single country, according to the advocacy group Global Witness.
Fossil fuel projects were stalled a year ago. Now they’re making a comeback.
A year after world leaders agreed to halt new fossil fuel projects to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the industry is facing a remarkable rebound, with sudden momentum behind more than 80 projects that include coal-fired power plants and gas export terminals — potentially locking in at least three decades of additional planet-warming pollution, The Washington Post’s Evan Halper reports.
The turnaround is expected to be a big point of contention at this year’s United Nations climate summit, which begins Sunday in Egypt, because it could jeopardize the world’s ability to avert the worst consequences of climate change.
Many nations began backsliding on their pledges to not build any new fossil fuel infrastructure as they raced to fill the energy void created by sanctions on Russia amid the war in Ukraine. But now, supply is increasing past what is needed to replace Russian deliveries, signaling to some investors that there is still a market for oil and gas despite strict environmental regulations.
However, International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol said that few of the proposed fossil fuel projects make economic sense as the cost of renewable power continues to fall. His agency’s new World Energy Outlook shows clean-energy technologies advancing so rapidly that overall fossil fuel use will peak within a few years and then permanently decline.
Biden administration announces $1.5B for national labs
The Energy Department and White House on Friday announced $1.5 billion to build and upgrade America’s national laboratories, which play a key role in the development of climate-friendly technologies.
The funding, which was authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act, will go toward critical infrastructure upgrades and other projects at 13 national labs across the country. The administration on Friday also announced the launch of the Net-Zero Game Changers Initiative, which will seek to spur innovation of technologies that can help achieve President Biden’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050.
“The fundamental science and technology development that’s really occurring at the national labs can unlock the clean-energy technologies that we need to tackle climate change,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Thursday on a call with reporters.
Granholm will join senior administration officials Friday at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Ill., to highlight the investments.
EPA announces largest-ever air pollution monitoring investment
The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday said it will direct $53.4 million to 132 air-monitoring projects across 37 states in an effort to better identify pollutants that can cause cancer or respiratory issues. It marks the largest investment for community air surveillance in the nation’s history.
The money, coming from the Inflation Reduction Act and the American Rescue Plan, is meant to assist communities that historically have been overburdened by harmful pollution, aligning with President Biden’s Justice40 initiative.
Monitoring will occur in cities and rural areas, including a stretch of Louisiana along the Mississippi River known as “Cancer Alley” for the many chemical plants, oil and gas refineries, and other industrial facilities there.
As Egypt hosts COP27, its most famous political prisoner may die, family warns
The Egyptian government is facing mounting scrutiny over how the country can host a prestigious climate summit while human rights groups allege that thousands of people who were unjustly imprisoned remain behind bars — including Alaa Abdel Fattah, 40, a British Egyptian computer programmer and activist who has been on a partial hunger strike for more than 200 days, The Post’s Siobhán O’Grady reports.
On Tuesday, Abdel Fattah reduced his daily 100-calorie intake to zero in a desperate bid to draw more attention to his case. If he is not released by the time the summit begins Sunday, he has told his family, he will stop drinking water.
A letter on Wednesday signed by 15 Nobel laureates asked world leaders to devote part of their agenda at COP27 to Egypt’s political prisoners, including “most urgently” the case of Abdel Fattah, who they said is “at risk of death.”
Egypt has strict rules against demonstrations and public gatherings, leaving some world leaders also wary that attendees or residents will face backlash for protesting or engaging visibly during COP27. About 100,000 people participated in a climate protest during last year’s summit in Glasgow, Scotland, where no such restrictions are in place.
A friendly reminder before Election Day:
