How Big Oil Is Changing the European Union’s Climate Policies

By Heiner Burkard

The global economy is still heavily reliant on fossil fuels to power its growth and the world´s wealth. Consensus in the European Union (EU) and the majority of the Western Hemisphere seems to be that those shall be phased out and make place for clean energies. Regarding the United States of America, securing its access to the largest oil reserves in the world and its unofficial doctrine of "Drill, Baby, Drill!", a phase-out of fossil fuels seems increasingly far-fetched. This piece investigates how those clinging to power, funded by fossil fuels, influence European politics and decision making in order to advance their own business agenda.

In 2015, the world witnessed a historic agreement on climate change action. The Paris Agreement was negotiated and agreed upon by 196 countries covering climate change mitigation, adaptation, and finance. Since then, the USA  has left the agreement a historic two times during the Trump administrations. Nevertheless, the agreement is still one of the most significant collaborative achievements in limiting climate change and protecting human development. This mainly stems from the fact that the agreement creates a legally binding international framework that obliges its members to act to achieve the objectives. EU countries are committed to fighting climate change by shifting to a climate-neutral economy with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. In 2019, the European Commission launched the European Green Deal to materialise the targets and to transition its economy in a socially inclusive and fair way, whilst boosting competitiveness. In numbers, the EU aims to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 55 per cent by 2030 and hit its long-term net-zero target in 2050.

According to European legislation, fostering a fair and just transition includes responsible corporate behaviour. For that transition, the European Commission proposed policies such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive as well as the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, commonly referred to as CSRD and CSDDD. The CSRD focuses on increasing the requirements for European companies to report how they are impacted by climate change and how their operations and products impact the climate and environment. The CSDDD, on the other hand, focuses on fostering responsible behaviour across companies’ global value chain. The objective is to eliminate violations of human rights, forced labour, child labour, as well as pollution and environmental degradation. Through this, companies that are either based in the EU or operate in the EU need to take responsibility for their whole global value chain and must ensure the exclusion of such behaviour. The European consumer market will profit from increased trust, more transparency, and the protection of both human rights and the environment. In practice, EU companies that have more than 1,000 employees and more than 450 million Euros turnover have to identify and address potential adverse impacts in their value chain. Furthermore, the regulation also requires non-EU companies that have a turnover of over 450 million Euros in the EU to fulfil the same reporting duties. Businesses complained that the regulation led to an immense increase in costs and effort to fulfil these duties. Companies with complex and elaborate value chains have emphasised especially enormous costs as well as the inability to comply to the new requirements. 

Anticipating this, many powerful companies and industries have started to influence European legislation to lobby for more lax climate policies to ease their burden of having to comply with regulations, ensuring that human rights are not violated. In 2024, two reports showed how much influence the fossil fuel lobby has on the EU’s climate policymaking. Big Oil, which are the seven largest fossil fuel companies by revenue, namely Shell, Total, Eni, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP, use their immense lobbying budget of close to 64 million Euros to advance their own business agenda. Their representatives and lobbyists alone held more than 1,000 meetings with European legislators between 2019 and 2024, according to a Transparency International report. Two-thirds of those meetings concerned the Union’s Green Deal. Further, the lobbying group strategically spoke to the EU’s delegates that were sent to the COP28, the Climate Change Conference in 2023, which notoriously was unable to deliver an agreement on the total fossil fuel phase-out. This occurred after attending parties, lobbying and succeeding in preventing the inclusion of a long-demanded phaseout. Raphaël Kergueno, who is a Senior Policy Officer at Transparency International, commented that “this pipeline of power extends from the EU level all the way to the global level”.

The analyses showed that Big Oil very successfully used Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the EU’s REPowerEU agenda to gain political access to advise the European legislators and executive branch. This “basically gave them free access to draft a new plan for the EU to respond on the threats linked to the Russions invasion and to make EU less dependent on Russion gas”. As experts told Euronews, through this, Big Oil and the entire fossil fuel industry were very successful in weakening, delaying, and blocking much of the desperately needed climate action to achieve their own targets set out in the Paris Agreement. This enormous influence of the fossil fuel lobby did not go undetected, and the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, called for strengthening the Commission’s transparency system by subjecting all managers to its transparency register in order to list all organisations and companies trying to influence European policymaking. The question still arises whether this is not already too late and should have been implemented much earlier in order to limit the unchecked and unregistered influence of global economic powers on European decision-making. Furthermore, this begs the question of how such influence and power harm the democratic processes within the EU. 

Is the European legislature actually able to act in the best interest of its citizens and according to the voters as well as the election outcome? Or are big economic players abusing the system of unchecked influence to push their own agenda in the name of maximising their profits even if it harms human life or the environment?

These questions might seem like topics that are up for debate and still need to be answered, but in the meantime, Big Oil and other lobbying groups have already answered with action. Leaked documents showed that Europeans were promised a landmark legislature that holds companies responsible for human rights abuses and environmental protection. At the same time, an US-based, secretive coalition of eleven large global enterprises, mostly fossil fuel companies, worked hard in order to not only amend and adjust the legislature, but to destroy it altogether. The alliance with the unassuming name Competitiveness Roundtable may be unknown, but its members are a who’s-who of polluting industries. Chevron, ExxonMobil, Trafigura, Dow Inc., TotalEnergies, Koch Inc., Honeywell, Baker Hughes, Nyrstar, Enterprise Mobility and JPMorgan Chase joined forces to influence democratically adopted EU law and to reduce their extent by removing meaningful provisions such as civil liability as well as the scope of the supply chain. The leaked documents also showed how the companies involved tried to stay hidden and strategically organised with a facilitator of their agenda. The facilitator is the US public relations and consultancy company Teneo. In 2025, the European Commission published the Omnibus amendment to its sustainability laws, such as the CSRD and the CSDDD. The documents revealed that the roundtable worked on significant and deep interventions within each of the three EU institutions in order to align the amendment with their views and agenda. It was shown that the activities in the EU parliament were more significant than what is visible in the EU Transparency Register. Eight of the Roundtable’s meetings in May and June 2025 show Teneo as the only attendee, while not naming other attending companies from the roundtable, and three meeting were not found in the register at all.

In the European Council, the alliance used a divide-and-conquer strategy to try to remove the climate article from the CSDDD. As German Chancellor Merz and French President Macron personally intervened in the European Council’s processes, the following amendments and changes to the Omnibus amendment strongly align with the Roundtable’s demands. Besides these influences, the roundtable further pushed the US administration to intervene and put pressure on the EU to ease its climate regulations and promoted anti-CSDDD messages through other channels. 

Even though these actions are not illegal, they pose a significant threat to the well-functioning of the European democracy. If the EU wants to be serious about its sovereignty and its democratic values, secretive groups of foreign companies and organisations must be hindered from writing or blocking European law. The power must belong to the people and not foreign business interests. 

Sources: Euronews, European Commission, Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO)

Written by Heiner Burkard

Edited by Nina Gush and Sarah Valkenburg