Former Calder High student Rachel Tansey is at the COP 19 climate talks in Warsaw. Thanks to her COP19 Guide to corporate lobbying, published by the Corporate Europe Observatory and Transnational Institute, it’s clear that the Polish government hosting COP19 is criminally complicit with a large number of fossil fuel companies that it has invited to sponsor and attend the climate talks – giving them free rein to bend and capture the agenda to serve their own interests.

Here’s Rachel talking to The Real News about what’s going on at COP19

Rachel reports that

“COP19 is the first UN climate talks to have corporate sponsorship, with some of the biggest climate crooks as official ‘partners’, including ArcelorMittal, Alstom and BMW.”

 

This is ratcheting up the corporate capture of the UN Climate change agenda and programmes that has been going on for years.

At Rio+20 in 2012 the UK Coalition government delegation was accompanied by four corporate partners – raising the question of whose interests the UK government was representing. Protesters decried attempts to advance the corporate “Green Economy” agenda, pointing out that it is really a “Greed Economy”, one based on extending the financial sector’s grab of the basic building blocks of the planet that sustains us all.

Water, earth, the atmosphere, plants are all being priced as ecosystems services, in order that these “services” can be traded in the same way as carbon credits and permits are currently traded through the EU Emissions Trading Scheme – a scheme that has made many companies rich, failed to reduce carbon emissions and imposed a socially-regressive tax on the public.