The oil industry has fought against government support for clean technologies for more than half a century, the Guardian can reveal, even as vast subsidies have propped up its polluting business model.
Kenner documented dozens of examples of the oil industry pressuring governments to hold back support for renewable energy, restrict funding for the development of clean technologies and weaken environmental rules that favoured their uptake. “It has been proven that the fossil fuel industry caused the climate crisis and deliberately lied about it as they hid the science,” she said. “So finding out that they knew renewable energy was such a threat to their industry that they had to lobby policymakers to rig the market against cleaner and cheaper technology to protect profits is just par for the course.”
Some of the industry’s early efforts to hold back competition later helped it argue that society could not do without it. An electric car charging point in London. Lobbyists on both sides of the Atlantic argued that government subsidies for clean technologies distorted free markets.FuelsEurope, which has also fought support for electric vehicles for more than a decade, pushed to weaken EU fuel efficiency standards in 2017 so they would allow combustion engine cars burning alternative fuels.