Exxon Could Be Stripped Of European Parliament Lobby Access
Exxon could lose its lobbying access to the European parliament after no company representative showed up at a hearing on climate change denial, the Guardian reports.
A member of the European parliament from the Green party has already submitted a request to ban the company.
“This is the company that denied the science, despite knowing the damage their oil exploitation was causing; which funded campaigns to block action on climate and now refuses to face up to its environmental crimes by attending today’s hearing. We cannot allow the lobbyists from such corporations free access to the corridors of the European parliament. We must remove their badges immediately,” Molly Scott Cato wrote in her request.
The company, however, said it was prevented from attending the hearing because of “ongoing climate change-related litigation in the US”. In a statement sent to the British daily, Exxon elaborated: “We reject the false allegation that ExxonMobil suppressed scientific research on climate change. News reports that claim we reached definitive conclusions about the science of climate change decades before the world’s experts are simply not accurate and have long since been debunked.”
Exxon has been targeted by environmentalists and other anti-oil groups at home, and just recently two municipalities in California—San Francisco and Oakland—renewed their fight to return their lawsuit against the supermajor and four other Big Oil companies to court.
San Francisco and Oakland are suing Chevron, Exxon, Shell, BP, and ConocoPhillips for selling oil products despite their knowledge of the effect these products had on the environment. Last week, they approached a federal appeals court with a request to reinstate their lawsuits against the Big Oil companies, which a U.S. District Judge dismissed last year.
In Europe, Exxon has spent more than US$35 million on lobbying at the European Parliament since 2010, according to figures from the Corporate Europe Observatory cited by the Guardian.