Friday 29 January 2021

Why is LafargeHolcim a member of API – the Big Oil lobby group ‘obstructing urgent climate action’?

LafargeHolcim – a company dependant on fossil fuels, a company with monstrous CO2 emissions, a company parent to Aggregate Industries – says "it is more important now than ever to unite around climate action." The company recently celebrated the Paris Agreement:


So why is LafargeHolcim a member of the American Petroleum Institute – a powerful Washington lobby group accused of obstructing climate change initiatives, of supporting the reversing of US regulation on methane emissions, of opposing electric vehicle subsidies, of backing the Trump administration’s efforts to open up protected Alaskan wilderness to drillers, of endorsing political candidates who argued against US participation in the Paris climate agreement?

LafargeHolcim’s membership fees to the API will have helped to fund all of that.

Clearly, whilst publicly LafargeHolcim claims to celebrate the Paris climate agreement, behind the scenes it is supporting an organisation that has been lobbying against it. Hypocrisy? Duplicity? Take your pick. 

API funds a group called the American Council on Capital Formation, which, along with the Chamber of Commerce, funded the debunked study claiming that the Paris Agreement would cause massive job losses and huge costs. This debunked report was cited by President Trump as justification for withdrawing from the Paris accord. So API funded the report used as a basis for withdrawal—but wait. It gets better. The authors of this API-funded study are the same two characters API hired way back in 1997 and 1998 to write similar reports critical of the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol, of course, was violently opposed in the Senate by the fossil fuel industry and API.
So why is LafargeHolcim a member of this Big Oil lobby group – when this month even Total, the French oil and gas giant, withdrew "following a detailed analysis of the climate positions of the American Petroleum Institute"?


Jeanett Bergan, head of responsible investment for Norwegian pension fund KLP, was quoted in the FT:
There is simply no justification for any association with lobby groups who roll back emissions regulation and undermine urgent climate action.
So why is LafargeHolcim still a member of API? According to this article, "LafargeHolcim... did not respond to a request for comment." Of course it wouldn't. What could it say?

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