This report makes me gag. But, here in the U.S., thanks to the dead guy who used to be on the Supreme Court, Scalia, and his reactionary buddies such as Alito and Thomas and Kennedy and Roberts, corporations are people and people have first amendment rights and so corporations as people are entitled to speak and money is speak. So there. It’s still fucking awful.
If you read this chart slowly and deliberately, it will tell you a terrible story. To understand it a little better, “APPEA” is the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association, a trade association for the oil industry. “WSPA” is the Western States Petroleum Association, another trade association. “API” is the American Petroleum Institute, the mother of all trade associations.
Link into the article to learn more about the methodology of the research and link into the base report from InfluenceMap.org. But here’s an excerpt:
More significantly, InfluenceMap says, “Extrapolated over the entire fossil fuel and other industrial sectors beyond, it is not hard to consider that this obstructive climate policy lobbying spending may be in the order of $500m annually.”
The group drew particular attention to the sinister lobbying group American Petroleum Institute (API), “one of the best funded and most consistently obstructive lobbying forces for climate policy in the United States,” as InfluenceMap notes:
“With a budget in excess of $200m, we estimate, through a forensic analysis of its IRS filings and careful study of its lobbying, PR, media and advertising activities, that around $65m of this is highly obstructive lobbying against ambitious climate policy. We estimate that ExxonMobil and Shell contribute $6m and $3m respectively to API’s obstructive spending of $65m. Its CEO Jack Gerard received annual compensation of just over $14m in 2013, probably one of the world’s highest paid lobbyists. In the run up to COP21 last year, he dismissed the Paris process as a ‘narrow political ideology.‘”
