Arquivo da tag: Lobby das petroleiras

Membros do Painel Climático da ONU não chegam a consenso sobre próximos relatórios (Reuters/Folha de S. Paulo)

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Artigo original

  • Países que defendem mais ações climáticas pedem nova revisão a tempo das negociações da ONU em 2028
  • Opositores citam preocupações com a inclusão e dizem que países mais pobres não têm capacidade para realizar revisões rápidas

10.out.2026 às 5h00

Kate Abnett e Sudarshan Varadhan

Bruxelas e Singapura | Reuters

A decisão deveria levar alguns minutos. Mas, após quase três anos de debate, os membros da principal autoridade mundial sobre mudanças climáticas ainda não elaboraram um cronograma para publicar sua próxima revisão das pesquisas científicas mais recentes sobre o aquecimento do planeta.

Essas avaliações do IPCC (Painel Intergovernamental sobre Mudanças Climáticas) serviram de base para todos os grandes acordos climáticos das Nações Unidas nas últimas três décadas. Porém, o impasse sobre as datas de publicação pode levar os países a decidir a próxima fase de ação sem um consenso sobre questões cruciais —incluindo até que ponto parte do aquecimento global poderia ser revertida—, segundo entrevistas com mais de uma dezena de cientistas atuais e antigos do IPCC, negociadores governamentais e observadores das reuniões.

Vista aérea mostra lama cinza cobrindo estruturas e terreno irregular após desastre ambiental. Edificações parcialmente soterradas e solo marcado por fluxos de lama.
Prédios cobertos com lama após as inundações que causaram centenas de mortes no Nepal, em agosto deste ano – Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters

A disputa reflete profundas divergências entre nações industrializadas ricas, grandes economias emergentes e países mais pobres sobre como responder à rápida elevação das temperaturas e quanto desse ônus deve ser assumido por cada país.

Na próxima segunda-feira (12), representantes dos 195 Estados-membros do IPCC devem se reunir em Adis Abeba, capital da Etiópia, para uma reunião plenária que muitos consideram a última oportunidade de definir datas de publicação anteriores às negociações climáticas da ONU de novembro de 2028. É nessa ocasião que os governos deverão avaliar o progresso em direção às metas estabelecidas no histórico Acordo de Paris, de 2015.

O Programa das Nações Unidas para o Meio Ambiente diz que os esforços globais para limitar o aquecimento estão aquém do necessário e que reduções mais rápidas das emissões são necessárias para evitar fenômenos meteorológicos extremos e desastres relacionados ao clima ainda mais graves. Cientistas disseram que as mudanças climáticas alimentaram os incêndios florestais na Europa e contribuíram para deslizamentos de terra e inundações repentinas que mataram centenas de pessoas no Nepal e no Tibete chinês.

A possibilidade de relatórios do IPCC não ficarem prontos para as negociações de 2028 preocupa países que defendem ações mais contundentes, pois as discussões orientarão financiamento climático e metas de redução de emissões.

“Os dados científicos recentes […] permitem uma abordagem justa, equitativa e baseada em evidências para enfrentar o maior desafio de nosso tempo, em vez de uma abordagem conduzida por aqueles cujos interesses arraigados são incompatíveis com a redução dos gases de efeito estufa”, afirmou a Coalizão de Alta Ambição em um comunicado, ao qual a Reuters teve acesso, divulgado nesta sexta-feira (8).

O comunicado é assinado por mais de 30 países, entre os quais da Europa, América Latina e pequenos países insulares.

As revisões do IPCC, publicadas a cada 5 a 7 anos, são redigidas por especialistas e aprovadas pelos Estados-membros. Índia, Quênia, Arábia Saudita, Rússia e China pedem mais tempo para garantir a participação de cientistas com menos recursos, que enfrentam dificuldades para publicar estudos ou deixar seus empregos.

“Se o processo avançar muito rapidamente […], ele não será inclusivo”, disse Joyce Kimutai, cientista climática que representa o Quênia no IPCC.

O impasse inédito ocorre sob pressão de governos críticos a políticas climáticas que, segundo eles, prejudicam a competitividade e restringem o uso de combustíveis baratos por economias emergentes. Os Estados Unidos, maior financiador do IPCC, deixaram a organização em janeiro.

O IPCC publicará três relatórios fundamentais: um sobre a dimensão e as causas das mudanças climáticas, outro sobre vulnerabilidades e como os países podem se adaptar, e um terceiro sobre as opções para impedir o agravamento do aquecimento. Os cientistas que presidem os grupos responsáveis pela elaboração dos relatórios propuseram um plano de trabalho segundo o qual os três seriam aprovados até setembro de 2028.

Robert Vautard, copresidente francês, disse que a proposta se baseou na carga de trabalho prevista, e não na data da cúpula da ONU de 2028. Os cronogramas dos relatórios costumam ser aprovados em “questão de minutos”, acrescentou.

Os opositores da proposta dos presidentes querem adiar o segundo e o terceiro relatórios para 2029, argumentando que o cronograma é curto demais para analisar milhares de estudos, chegar a um acordo sobre a redação e concluir as revisões por especialistas e governos.

A disputa semeia discórdia e desconfiança em uma organização concebida para ajudar os países a superar divergências.

Os participantes trocaram acusações de politização do trabalho do IPCC. Alguns dos que defendem a publicação antes da cúpula de 2028 observam que grandes nações produtoras de petróleo estão entre as defensoras mais enfáticas de um prazo maior e as acusam de tentar evitar pressões para reduzir mais rapidamente as emissões de CO2.

O Ministério da Economia da Rússia diz que apresentar o debate como um confronto com produtores de petróleo era uma “deturpação deliberada” e que sincronizar o ciclo de avaliação com as negociações da ONU “levanta sérias dúvidas sobre a preservação da natureza independente do IPCC”.

Thiagarajan Jayaraman, cientista que representa a Índia no IPCC, afirmou ser “míope” sugerir que o valor do trabalho do órgão depende exclusivamente de sua contribuição para as negociações da ONU em 2028. Representantes da Arábia Saudita e da China apresentaram argumentos semelhantes em reuniões anteriores. Seus governos não responderam às perguntas para esta reportagem.

Equidade e inclusão

Países em desenvolvimento argumentam que suas perspectivas não são refletidas de forma suficiente nos relatórios do IPCC porque não há especialistas desses países em número suficiente e porque seus pesquisadores dispõem de menos recursos para publicar estudos revisados por pares.

Thiagarajan questiona, por exemplo, o que considera uma falta de consideração pelas contribuições históricas dos países ricos para o aquecimento global e pelas necessidades de desenvolvimento das nações mais pobres nos modelos usados pelo IPCC para avaliar quanto as temperaturas podem subir sob diferentes cenários de emissões.

O IPCC afirma estar tomando medidas para tornar as avaliações mais inclusivas.

Os próximos relatórios incluirão, pela primeira vez, capítulos sobre financiamento climático e formas de lidar com danos irreversíveis infligidos a alguns países, disse em junho o presidente do IPCC, Jim Skea.

Os países que defendem esse cronograma no IPCC afirmam que, de outra forma, os negociadores teriam de se basear em relatórios publicados em 2021 e 2022. Muita coisa mudou desde então.

Em 2024, pela primeira vez, as temperaturas globais ficaram, em média, mais de 1,5 °C acima dos níveis pré-industriais. Os próximos relatórios tentarão preencher lacunas de conhecimento sobre essa ultrapassagem, incluindo as possíveis consequências de intervenções destinadas a remover dióxido de carbono da atmosfera.

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Editorial: Misinformation is blocking climate action, and the U.N. is finally calling it out (Los Angeles Times)

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latimes.com

By The Times Editorial Board March 7, 2022 3 AM PT

A landmark U.N. climate report on the escalating effects of global warming broke new ground by finally highlighting the role of misinformation in obstructing climate action. It was the first time one of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s exhaustive assessments has called out the ways in which fossil fuel companies, climate deniers and conspiracy theorists have sown doubt and confusion about climate change and made it harder for policymakers to act.

The expert panel’s report released last week mostly focused on the increasing risk of catastrophe to nature and humanity from climate change. But it also laid out clear evidence of how misinformation about climate change and the “deliberate undermining of science” financed and organized by “vested economic and political interests,” along with deep partisanship and polarization, are delaying action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to their impacts.

The assessment describes an atmosphere in which public perception about climate change is continually undermined by fossil fuel interests’ peddling of false, misleading and contrarian information and its circulation through social media echo chambers; where there’s an entrenched partisan divide on climate science and solutions; and people reject factual information if it conflicts with their political ideology.

Sound familiar? It should, because the climate misinformation landscape is worse in the United States than practically any other country.

While the section on misinformation covers only a few of the more than 3,600 pages in the report approved by 195 countries, it’s notable that it’s in a chapter about North America and calls out the U.S. as a hotbed for conspiracy theories, partisanship and polarization. A 2018 study of 25 countries that was cited in the IPCC report found that the U.S. had a stronger link between climate skepticism and conspiratorial and conservative ideology than in any other nation tested. These forces aren’t just a threat to democracy, they are major roadblocks to climate action and seem to have sharpened with the Trump presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Misinformation was included in the North America chapter for the first time this year “because there has been a lot of research conducted on the topic since the last major IPCC report was published in 2014,” said Sherilee Harper, one of the lead authors and an associate professor at the University of Alberta in Canada. “Evidence assessed in the report shows how strong party affiliation and partisan opinion polarization can contribute to delayed climate action, most notably in the U.S.A., but also in Canada.”

The IPCC’s language is measured but leaves no doubt that the fossil fuel industry and politicians who advance its agenda are responsible. It is shameful that fossil fuel interests have been so successful in misleading Americans about the greatest threat to our existence. The industry has engaged in a decades-long campaign to question climate science and delay action, enlisting conservative think tanks and public relations firms to help sow doubt about global warming and the actions needed to fight it.

These dynamics help explain why U.S. politicians have failed time after time to enact significant federal climate legislation, including President Biden’s stalled but desperately needed “Build Back Better” bill that includes $555 billion to spur growth in renewable energy and clean transportation. And they show that combating disinformation is a necessity if we are to break through lawmakers’ refusal to act, which is increasingly out of step with Americans’ surging levels of alarm and concern about the overheating of the planet.

“We’ve seen misinformation poisoning the information landscape for over three decades, and over that time the public has been getting more and more polarized,” said John Cook, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University in Australia. “The U.S. is the strongest source of misinformation and recipient of misinformation. It’s also the most polarized on climate.”

Cook and his colleagues studied misinformation on conservative think-tank websites and contrarian blogs over the last 20 years and charted the evolution of the climate opposition from outright denial of the reality of human-caused climate change and toward attacking solutions such as renewable energy or seeking to discredit scientists.

Cook said his research has found the most effective way to counter climate obstruction misinformation is to educate people about how to identify and understand different tactics, such as the use of fake experts, cherry-picked facts, logical fallacies and conspiracy theories. For example, seeing words such as “natural” or “renewable” in fossil fuel advertising raises red flags that you’re being misled through greenwashing.

“It’s like teaching people the magician’s sleight-of-hand trick,” Cook said.

There have been important efforts recently to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for disinformation. In a hearing that was modeled on tobacco industry testimony from a generation ago, House Democrats hauled in oil executives last fall to answer to allegations that their companies have concealed their knowledge of the risks of global warming to obstruct climate action (they, unsurprisingly, denied them).

Perhaps we are getting closer to a turning point, where public realization that we’ve been misinformed by polluting industries begins to overcome decades of planet-endangering deceit and delay. Having the world’s scientists finally begin to call out the problem certainly can’t hurt.

Leaked: The Oil Lobby’s Conspiracy to Kill Off California’s Climate Law (Bloomberg Business Week)

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By    November 25, 2014

Looking south over Los Angeles and the 101 Freeway, with the morning haze and smog on Jan. 28

Photograph by David Bro/Zuma Press

Looking south over Los Angeles and the 101 Freeway, with the morning haze and smog on Jan. 28

You remember Fillmore. He’s the resident hippie of Radiator Springs in the Pixar blockbuster Cars. Much to the chagrin of his neighbor, Sarge the Army Jeep, Fillmore greets each new day with Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock rendition of A Star Spangled Banner—“respect the classics, man”—and is quick with a conspiracy theory about why biofuels never stood a chance at America’s gas pumps. Perfectly voiced by the late, great George Carlin, Fillmore has a slight paranoiac edge, as if his intake of marijuana may exceed what’s medically indicated.

Well, as they say, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to delay, rewrite, or kill off a meaningful effort to reduce the build-up of carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere. A Powerpoint (MSFT) deck now being circulated by climate activists—a copy of which was sent to Bloomberg Businessweek—suggests that there is a conspiracy. Or, if you prefer, a highly coordinated, multistate coalition that does not want California to succeed at moving off fossil fuels because that might set a nasty precedent for everyone else.

Created by the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA), one of the most powerful oil and gas lobbies in the U.S., the slides and talking points comes from a Nov. 11 presentation to the Washington Research Council. The Powerpoint deck details a plan to throttle AB 32 (also known as the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006) and steps to thwart low carbon fuel standards (known as LCFS) in California, Oregon, and Washington State. Northwest Public Radio appears to have been the first to confirm the authenticity of the deck, which Bloomberg Businessweek did as well, with WSPA spokesman Tupper Hull.

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Specifically, the deck from a presentation by WSPA President Catherine Reheis-Boyd lays out the construction of what environmentalists contend is an elaborate “astroturf campaign.” Groups with names such as Oregon Climate Change Campaign, Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy, and AB 32 Implementation Group are made to look and sound like grassroots citizen-activists while promoting oil industry priorities and actually working against the implementation of AB 32.

The deck also reveals how WSPA seized on a line from a California Air Resources Board memo that the cap-and-trade program for gas and diesel that goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2015, may affect gas prices in order to launch an ad campaign warning of a “hidden” gas tax that devious Sacramento pols are sneaking through.

“The environmental community is used to sky-is-falling analysis from fossil fuel interests in response to clean energy initiatives, so that part isn’t surprising,” says Tim O’Connor, a senior attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund, to whom I sent the deck for comment. “But it’s eye-opening to see the lengths [the WSPA] has gone to push back rather than move forward. I don’t think anybody knew how cross-jurisdictional, cross-border, and extensive their investment is in creating a false consumer backlash against [climate legislation].”

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In California, O’Connor points out, “we have 70 percent voter approval on clean energy alternatives, so it’s offensive and atrocious they’re using these supposed everyday citizens—who are really paid advertisers—to change the public discourse.”

Reheis-Boyd’s Powerpoint deck, entitled “WSPA Priority Issues,” starts by announcing that these are the “the best of times.” Crude oil production in the U.S. is higher than it has been since 1997, with imports subsequently reduced to a 20-year low, according to the American Petroleum Institute. The next six slides describe why these are also “the worst of times” and include images of demonstrators protesting the Keystone XL oil pipeline, demanding government action on climate change, and pictures of professor-cum-activist Bill McKibben and billionaire Tom Steyer, with the latter quoted as saying he wants to “destroy these people”—i.e., people like the members of WSPA.

Then there’s a slide with all the different groups that WSPA has funded to make it seem as if there’s a broad group in three states opposing a series of initiatives to reduce carbon pollution from fossil fuels. The most clever of these is the “Stop the Hidden Gas Tax!” campaign. Who, after all, wants that?

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“Let me be clear,” says Hull, the WSPA spokesman. “We did not oppose AB 32 when it passed. We believe it’s good to have the reduction of greenhouse gases as a goal. We support that goal.” In the years since, he says, “hundreds of pages of regulations have been added to what had been a page-and-a-half document, and we do object to many of the additions.” What’s more, Hull says, “we have a legitimate concern over what will happen when the cap-and-trade program goes into effect for gas and diesel.”