The Center for Public Integrity

Beijing — China awoke to climate change with a storm. It was late January 2008, a time when people across the country were busily gathering recipes, stocking fireworks, and preparing to welcome relatives to celebrate the Lunar New Year. But suddenly, severe ice storms brought much of the nation to a standstill. For two weeks, fierce winds, sleet, and snow downed power lines, shuttered businesses, and razed more than 200,000 homes across southern and central China. Hundreds of thousands of travelers who had been headed home to see families were stranded on icy rail platforms. Cities struggled to provide power and water to residents, and snow blanketed the Taklamakan desert. Even the bright lights of Shanghai briefly went dark. All told, more than 100 people were killed.

Bangkok — Protesters drenched by an October downpour gathered outside Bangkok’s United Nations Conference Center recently, shouting through bullhorns and denouncing countries for the weak commitments they’ve shown in negotiating a treaty to curb greenhouse gases. Inside, the atmosphere was more businesslike: professionals lingering around coffee bars, smiling at familiar faces, and grasping hands in recognition. Later, they would meet behind closed doors in a conclave dominated by representatives of the world’s top energy companies.

Welcome to the world of “BINGOs” — Business and Industry Non-Governmental Organizations that have long played a key role in shaping the global debate on climate change. Industry groups are operating under United Nations rules that exclude individual corporations from attending the climate summit, instead requiring businesses to join associations to represent them. The Bangkok talks were one of several sessions leading up to the formal negotiations, starting in Copenhagen on Dec. 7, aimed at producing a new global treaty limiting carbon emissions.

Here at the conference center, several dozen BINGO executives gathered to debrief each other on such high-stakes matters as global targets for emissions reduction, the number of carbon offsets, and timetables for implementation. But while the agenda of the BINGOs on climate change seems clear, their strategy is harder to discern. And the results of their efforts are often intangible. In other words, this is not lobbying as it is commonly understood. “What we do here is we loiter,” says John Scowcroft of the European Union of the Electricity Industry. “It’s loitering with intent.”

Todd Stern received a standing ovation from fellow negotiators when he was introduced at this year’s first session of international talks to craft a new treaty to combat climate change. As the new climate envoy for the United States, Stern represented the nation that had contributed more than any other to the world’s burden of greenhouse gases. But for eight years the industrial leader had largely been on the sidelines as the rest of the world tried to implement the solution embodied in an agreement signed in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997. Now, Stern represented a new president who had pledged to engage vigorously in global discussions aimed at arriving at a successor treaty by December in Copenhagen. As Germany’s environment minister said that March day in Bonn, the United States was “back in the game.” Stern would remember that instant long after the applause had died. It was the moment, he since has joked, when perhaps he should have quit while ahead.

Sydney — Not long after Oleg Deripaska was named Russia’s richest man for 2008, his company’s Australian chairman wrote to the Department of Climate Change in Canberra with a dire warning: The oligarch’s considerable investment in Australia was being threatened by the plan to tackle global warming being advanced by the government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Starting in July 2009, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists fielded an eight-country team of reporters to uncover the special interests attempting to influence negotiations on a global climate change treaty. Relying on more than 200 interviews, lobbying and campaign contribution records in a half-dozen countries, and on-the-ground reporting from Beijing to Brussels, our team pieced together the story of a far-reaching, multinational backlash by fossil fuel industries and other heavy carbon emitters aimed at slowing progress on control of greenhouse gas emissions. Employing thousands of lobbyists, millions in political contributions, and widespread fear tactics, entrenched interests worldwide are thwarting the steps that scientists say are needed to stave off a looming environmental calamity, the investigation found.

The project fielded reporters in eight of the major economies deemed essential to a successful treaty: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Japan, and the United States, as well as the European Union. Among our findings:

In the poor, but mineral-rich mountains of the eastern United States known as Appalachia, coal millionaire Don Blankenship hosts a rally for “Friends of America” to hear country music and “learn how environmental extremists and corporate America are both trying to destroy your jobs.”

On the other side of the globe, with an eye on his venture in an Australian port town known both as a gateway to the Great Barrier Reef and a smokestack industry haven, aluminum billionaire Oleg Deripaska battles that nation’s program to address climate change as “destructive for jobs, destructive for new and existing investment.”

And in China, ambitious renewable electricity plans look like an important step toward tackling global warming, but progress lags due to built-in and deeply entrenched favoritism for cheaper fossil fuel. “There’s no need for anyone to get over-excited,” says Lu Qizhou, the government appointee who heads China’s big power industry group. Change from the coal-fired energy system will be slow and won’t outpace “the market’s ability to cope.”

Around the world the story is the much same. Wherever nations have taken the first modest steps to stave off a looming environmental calamity for future generations, they’ve triggered a backlash from powers rooted in the economy of the past. Opponents of climate action may have different methods as they pressure different capitals, but the message is consistent: Be afraid that a cherished way of life may be lost. Be afraid that a better standard of living will never be had.