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The “green” corporations funding anti-climate groups
HEATED reached out to five companies with strong public climate commitments to find out why they're still funding major climate policy obstructors.
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We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: We won’t be able to meaningfully reduce climate pollution in the U.S. until we do something about trade associations.
Organized business groups aligned with the fossil fuel industry collectively spend hundreds of millions each year to stymie climate and environmental policy. From 2008 to 2018, trade groups allied with Big Oil and other major climate polluters outspent clean energy trade groups 27 to 1.
Two of the most climate obstructionist trade associations that work on behalf of major polluters are the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable. The Chamber is “the number one obstruction in the path of a just transition to clean energy,” according to a 2023 report on the group’s long history of anti-climate lobbying. The group was a major voice against President Joe Biden’s signature climate law; it opposed pollution limits for power plants and transportation; and it worked to dismantle climate transparency rules for public corporations. Currently, the group is suing Vermont to stop its game-changing climate law that would hold corporations accountable for damage they do to the planet.
And though the Business Roundtable insists it supports climate policy, the group has lobbied against many major efforts to reduce pollution. The association is currently calling on Congress to ban environment- and climate- focused shareholder proposals, which often seek to force companies to set more ambitious climate targets, such as Chevron shareholders’ successful 2021 proposal to reduce Scope 3 emissions. In 2021, the Business Roundtable also “spent millions of dollars to stop the Biden administration’s Build Back Better agenda, which included significant efforts to reduce carbon emissions and promote clean energy,” the Guardian reported.
These group’s anti-climate lobbying activities are only possible because of the millions they receive in annual membership payments from corporate members. And according to a new report, many of those corporate members claim to be climate champions themselves.
The “green” corporations funding climate obstruction
The advocacy group ClimateVoice released a scorecard last week calling out 20 companies for publicly championing climate action while quietly obstructing climate policy through dues payments to The Chamber and Business Roundtable.
These companies “are telling the public that they have these green reputations and they're buying renewable energy,” said Jennifer Allyn, director of campaigns and programs for ClimateVoice. “And yet they belong to these organizations that are actively lobbying against it.”
Many of these companies pay hundreds of thousands in annual dues to these groups, according to those companies’ own reporting. Trade associations do not disclose dues payments, so the amount provided may not be exhaustive, ClimateVoice explained in its methodology.
HEATED reached out to five corporations from the list that we believe have the strongest public climate commitments to get a sense of what is driving their membership in these anti-climate groups.
Here’s who we reached out to, why we reached out to them, and what they said.