Boom for Business Lobbyists at Climate Talks

Channel Four in the United Kingdom reports that, according to official figures, "the number of delegates and lobbyists taking part in United Nations climate change talks has trebled in the past 12 years." Olivier Hoedeman, from Corporate Europe Observatory, observed that "there has been a very substantial increase in the number of lobby groups going to these summits and it’s not as people would probably imagine – it is often business groups rather than environmental ones." At the Kyoto conference in December 1997, there were 3,663 people from 236 groups, the largest of which was International Chamber of Commerce. At the Bali conference in December 2007, there were 4,993 lobbyists from 335 separate lobby groups, with 376 of those from the International Emissions Trading Association, a group which "did not even exist at the time of the original Kyoto talks." COP15 organizers are expecting 18,000 to attend the Copenhagen talks, of which approximately 5,000 will will be media and the remainder delegates and lobbyists.