International Climate Change Conference Bonn, Germany July 21st 2001
Briefing papers: the oil companies

You are from Exxon-Mobil, the world¹s largest oil company. You are only an observer at this conference. That means that you can watch what's going on but you are not allowed to say anything, however much you want to! However, when there is a break between sessions, you can have meetings with anyone you like (provided they will listen to you). You want to get your point of view across, so you have to listen very carefully to find out what the different delegations are saying. You need to know who might be your allies at this conference.

This January you announced the world's largest ever corporate annual profit of $16.9 billion. You like the world the way it is - everyone needs oil and everyone depends on you to provide it. It pays you well, ensuring that you keep those huge profits rolling in.

You have plenty of power and influence to make sure that the world stays this way too. You have money to pay hundreds of scientists and researchers to look into the issue of climate change and global warming and come up with the results that you want everyone to hear - we're not sure that there's any risk at all - it's only the cranky environmentalists, who are always telling us that the world is about to end anyway!
However, unfortunately for you, more and more people including governments are starting to listen to and believe the environmentalists.

However, you do have one really good thing going for you at this conference. You gave a lot of money to the Republicans in their election campaign last year. Thanks to your money, President Bush is now in power, and he knows that he's in your debt. You led the campaign in the USA to get him to pull out of the Kyoto agreement, and now he has announced that he has done that.

You're at this conference to remind him of how much he owes you and to make sure that he doesn't agree to anything that you're not happy with. You know he has some clever suggestions to make that will make it look as though he is environmentally friendly without really cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions. You are quite happy about these suggestions because they won't mean anyone using less fossil fuel so your profits will stay nice and fat. You might even put some money towards these proposals of President Bush's to make your company look environmentally friendly too!