Was the UN Plastics Treaty Collapse Due to Industry Lobbying?
NGO activists in Busan outnumbered industry participants by more than ten-to-one
Last weekend, the UN Global Plastics Treaty conference (officially called: “Intergovernmental negotiating committee to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment” or INC-5 for short) was held over seven days in Busan, Republic of Korea. It concluded, as was widely expected, with no agreement. As is customary when green activists leave these large conferences empty-handed, there was the ritual blame game executed to deflect attention from their own failure.
The first argument the activists fed, unscrutinized, into the media machine was that oil-producing nations, led by Saudi Arabia, were protecting a main source of their fossil fuel market. This though seems a bit of a stretch given that only 6%, at most, of global petroleum production goes into plastics manufacturing. So, like the failed COP29 climate conference, concluded the week before in Baku, Azerbaijan, activists reverted to blaming the failure of a global agreement on the dominance of corporate lobbyists who, yet again, interfered with the positive ambitions of the pure at heart.
There are NGOs dedicated to counting corporate lobbyists at these events and reporting on anything they say to try to block global agreements to protect nature. Groups like Corporate Europe Observatory, US Right to Know and the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) are not out on the beaches picking up plastic waste. These NGOs, with large foundation-driven budgets, have only one objective: destroy the reputation and public trust in industry. Every large UN event that fails pushes these groups closer to their ultimate goal of getting industry stakeholders banned from attending such conventions.
220 Corporate Lobbyists v 2200 Activist NGO Lobbyists
The Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) published a report in the middle of the UN Plastics Treaty conference claiming that fossil fuel lobbyists were “flooding” the plastics negotiations with the intention of “infiltrating the process” and blocking any successful conclusion. They claim, after they had “scraped and analyzed” the provisional list of participants “line by line”, that 220 fossil fuel and chemical industry lobbyists had “flooded” the UN Global Plastics Treaty conference in Busan.
CIEL used all of the predictable tired steps: coordinating a coalition of NGOs to support and amplify their study, use a broad definition of “industry lobbyist” (to include any researcher ever funded by industry or any recyclers or innovative start-ups that cooperate with industry) and try to show how government delegations have also been “infiltrated” by these contaminating lobbyists. A tried-and-tested activist technique is to name several widely vilified plastic producers so CIEL called out Dow Chemical for sending five delegates and ExxonMobil for the four who inundated Busan. The Guardian picked up the report, with their “journalist”, Sandra Laville, repeating the findings literally word-for-word with no critical assessment outside of reading the NGO’s press release.
Should this large newspaper have done some of their own research? Come on now! This is the Guardian – they are funded by the same foundations paying off the NGOs running these campaigns. They see journalism as merely amplifying activist campaign literature, no matter how far it may stray from reality. And who would bother to question the newspaper’s attacks on industry?
I obtained a copy of that same provisional list of participants (available below) and also “scraped and analyzed it line by line” and after a short research (something a newspaper like the Guardian seems incapable of doing), I can conclude that there were over 2200 NGO activists who were registered as delegates and went to Busan to continue their campaigns against plastics. In other words, while the NGOs scream foul about 220 industry-related participants at the UN Global Plastics Treaty conference, they were outnumbered by a factor of ten-to-one by NGO activists.
The UN’s provisional list of participants runs for 149 pages with an average of 30 delegates per page. The national delegations ran for 67 pages, the UN groups have four pages of delegates and the NGOs have 74 pages (that is 2220 delegates from NGOs). This does not include several pages of multilateral organizations or conservation groups (like IUCN) that are effectively NGOs or the number of NGO activists included within government delegations. In other words, 220 industry delegates that the Center for International Environmental Law has been screaming about, is about 10% of the number of NGO activists attending the conference in Busan (who make up almost half of the total UN conference participants).
So tell me again. Which stakeholder group, exactly, is flooding the UN Plastics Treaty conference?
How Greenpeace and WWF Broke the Rules to “Flood the Conference”
Each stakeholder group was allowed to send a maximum of five delegates to the UN conference. Except if you are NGOs like Greenpeace (who flew in at least 29 delegates) or WWF (who flooded the conference with at least 27 activists). I say “at least” because many activists work for multiple NGOs at the same time so campaigners from Greenpeace or WWF involved with other groups would likely claim these other affiliations to be able to get around the UN rules. These two NGOs, by themselves, probably took up four to five floors of hotel space in Busan. I suppose they have money to burn (and then they had the gall to complain about how certain industry lobbyists were able to afford to send five delegates to Korea … ouch!)
How did these NGOs get away with loading so many activists into the conference room? Any activist delegation that did not have a full roster of allowed delegates (like the David Suzuki Foundation) must have been approached by these NGOs for one of their seats at their table. Then there were the national delegations that did not have limitations on the number of representatives. For example, a WWF delegate wormed his way into the room as a member of the Fijian delegation. Did the NGO pay the government of Fiji for the conference lanyard? The Fijian delegation was very vocal in complaining about the conference outcome and so they should be. Of the 11 delegates they brought to Busan, four were from large environmental NGOs and not from the government. The same applies to the Filipino delegation. I could not see which industry lobbyists had “infiltrated” the national delegations, but if CIEL claims they did, I must assume the NGO is telling the truth. Well …
Another NGO flying below my radar was called: Break Free From Plastic. They did not have a delegation in Busan, but had 15 delegates participating across other groups. They seem to be a big organization with a large global network, implying that many of their members are also sub-contracted to other NGOs (a common practice of timesheet sharing) or they wanted to be able to influence a large number of delegations to ensure their objectives were met. Curious.
These three NGOs, officially allowed a maximum of 15 delegates, fielded at least 67 activists at the UN Plastics Treaty conference. And then these NGOs complained about industry lobbyists “flooding” the conference and “infiltrating the process” with four managers participating as members of toothless international trade associations.
But if only it were that simple.
A New Type of Activist Body: Fiscal Sponsors
This UN Plastics Treaty conference was the first event where foundations seem to be taking a more aggressive frontline role in pushing their interests. Two groups on the UN list caught my attention and my concern: The Resources Legacy Fund and the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers, Inc. Both of these groups are not foundations but fiscal sponsors. That means that they are foundation consultants who create and manage special interest groups based on funding from a network of (often non-transparent) foundations to fund specific actions (often with goals that the foundations would rather not make public or use traditional NGO-funding means).
The Resources Legacy Fund, for example, created an obscure group that raised tens of millions of dollars from seven foundations to fund Sher Edling, an American tort law firm, to file dozens of climate nuisance lawsuits against fossil fuel companies, not to exact justice but simply to harass them. (See the Firebreak exposé here, here and here).
So what were these vultures doing sniffing around Busan?
The Resources Legacy Fund sent five delegates on behalf of the Beyond Petrochemicals Campaign, a group started two years ago by Michael Bloomberg to stop new petrochemical sites from being built. Bloomberg dropped $85 million dollars into a bucket, attended a press conference and then left it to the Resources Legacy Fund to manage the organization and develop the grassroots campaigns in the local communities facing new industrial developments. I suppose flying delegates to Busan for a week of Korean fried chicken is an integral part of these objectives (while including a director from Bloomberg Philanthropies in the delegation for good measure).
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers, Inc, not directly related to the Rockefeller groups of foundations, was at the UN Plastics Treaty negotiations representing a group they formed called the Plastics Solutions Fund. This is an organization that is funding projects finding solutions to plastic pollution (like, for example, financing the activist campaign group, the Center for International Environmental Law, to produce ridiculous reports on industry lobbying). The foundations funding this fiscal sponsor include the usual anti-industry suspects (Oak, Marisla, Park, Bloomberg…). In other words, a group of foundations is funding a fiscal sponsor consultancy, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers, Inc, to fund the Plastics Solution Fund to fund collaborative projects (or fly everyone to Korea for a conference … same difference). This is another good example of where the consultants are taking the lion’s share of the foundation funding (and going to Busan to network with other activist consultants).
Something needs to be done about the growing influence of these over-funded fiscal sponsor consultants.
This story now takes a turn into the absurd.
Visa Scams? Zero UN Oversight on Participation
More than 20 years ago, I organized a science communications conference in Brussels and I noticed that I had a large number of registrations from young Nigerian women. They had all sent me similarly worded letters requesting support in obtaining their visas to fly to Europe to attend our one-day conference. It did not take too much to realize that these were not 22-year-old toxicologists with an interest in sci-comm.
Something similar seems to be going on with the Global Plastics Treaty conference. But in this case, no one at the UN seemed to have done any due diligence to scrutinize which NGOs were legitimate and should have been allowed to attend. It appears that anyone at all could register and attend this high-level UN global policy conference.
Here are some examples that stuck out as, well, suspicious NGO groups that should have thrown up red flags if anyone at the UN were taking their jobs seriously.
Back from the Dead
The Zamani Foundation registered five delegates. This Nigerian-based NGO has an outdated website that shows how they work for women empowerment (but nothing related to plastics advocacy). But a simple Google search reveals that the Zamani Foundation has been permanently closed.
Shouldn’t the UN have checked this information before allowing five delegates to attend their high-level conference claiming to be from the Zamani Foundation? Even if the foundation still exists, their reliance on volunteers suggests they were operating on a shoe-string budget. How would their five delegates have found the funds to travel from Nigeria to Korea? Did the UN help fund their travel and visa?
I wonder where these delegates are now.
Empowering Widows and Teenage Girls … Seriously???
Another Nigerian NGO, that registered five delegates to the global Plastics Treaty negotiations, was the Paradise Mission for Widows & Teenage Girls. Their website is quite moving but does not contain the word “plastic” once. As well, they seem to have limited donors and no real funding for their main mission: to support young girls who are unable to continue their education. (The same situation applies to the Ugandan NGO, Empowerment Initiative for Women and Youth Uganda, who registered five delegates but have no activities relative to plastics issues and no significant donor base.)
The president of Paradise Mission for Widows & Teenage Girls, Jane Ogo Egbo, seems to be a local mover and shaker and her website claims she was connected to the UN, in 2008, with a “special Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)”. So Jane brought four of her colleagues from the Paradise Mission for Widows & Teenage Girls to Busan … for what, I don’t know. Maybe the UN should have asked that question … or the Guardian … or somebody besides this lowly blogger.
What I find outrageous is that the Center for International Environmental Law claims that they “scraped and analyzed the provisional list of participants line by line” and they did not find anything suspicious about an NGO called the Paradise Mission for Widows & Teenage Girls attending a UN conference negotiating a global treaty on plastic pollution. Don’t these activists read or are they so obsessed by their anti-industry dogma they have long ago lost any smidgen of integrity? How could this NGO publish such nonsense and then sleep at night?
These activists must be completely stupid if they think they could publish false and inflammatory allegations against industry without anyone noticing the glaring reality. Worse, the CIEL authors assume that no one will actually read any more than what they tell them. In other words, they believe their audience is completely stupid.
And the Guardian “journalist”, Sandra Laville bought into the NGO’s anti-industry bullshit without thinking twice or doing her own research. Reading is so hard for such self-proclaimed professionals. What an absolute disgrace.
God Hates Plastic
Even more absurd are the five delegates who travelled from Ghana (I think) to attend the UN’s Global Plastics Treaty representing the NGO: God’S Harvest Foundation (with a capital S, I assume, to throw off search engines). A search for this foundation came up with nothing on the web, unless they are a chapter of the Harvest Foundation. This US-based group organizes retreats all over the world for burnt out religious pastors. (What a great idea! I could use a break.) So perhaps these were Ghanaian pastors who got funding to have a retreat in Busan and enjoy “some much needed rest”. And hopefully the UN would help them with costs and visas.
I wonder if, just maybe, someone at the UN could have looked more closely at these five delegates instead of just allowing any activist, and his dog, to attend their Global Plastics Treaty conference. The NGOs are campaigning for the UN to scrutinize (and ban) only industry-related participants (like the World Health Organization does in their refusal to have any contact at all with industry). That would surely give more microphone time at the plenaries to the delegates from God’S Harvest Foundation.
By the way, the Holy See did send a delegation to Busan as well. Given that plastic is not part of God’s creation, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why the Vatican sent three delegates to Korea.
Why did the UN Plastics Treaty fail?
So the NGOs are in a huff, again, about how many industry lobbyists attended … or rather, “flooded” (and assumedly railroaded) another failed UN conference. There have been three spectacular NGO failures in six weeks at global UN events if you consider the COP29 climate conference and the COP16 biodiversity event. The NGO coalitions are trying to force the UN to block future industry involvement but at the same time, there seems to be no scrutiny whatsoever on any NGO delegate who wants to attend. The hypocrisy here is simply spectacular.
The activists were able to stack the deck and dominate the UN Plastics Treaty conference by a number of ten-to-one in delegates. And still they failed to achieve their objectives. How is that possible?
Environmental NGOs tend to show up at these UN events with unreasonable objectives that they then refuse to compromise on. At the climate financing COP in Baku, they demanded the wealthy countries pay $1.3 trillion a year for a “just transition” in developing countries. In Busan, they wanted nothing less than a total ban on plastics. Facing the intransigence of an overwhelming number of environmental activists in the room, the UN, even with the support of a coalition of supportive companies and industry groups, was unable to find an agreement on managing plastic waste at the global level.
Perhaps the UN Global Plastics Treaty conference in Busan, Korea, was not a failure for the NGOs. Maybe their intention was to ensure the conference failed to further their own campaigns.
NGOs have always been against better plastic waste management (as a recent Firebreak article demonstrated). That would imply that plastics might have a long-term future and that is a non-starter for them. Every image of every beach, every river and every forest overflowing with plastic waste moves them one step closer to their goal of banning all plastics. It would make sense for them to block any global agreement that would clean up this pollution or make plastics less of a global problem. And if, in blocking the UN in their attempts, they can also blame and further discredit industry and move closer to excluding them from participating in future global conferences, then that is just a cherry on their cake.
In any case, these are zealots, ideologues, led only by their relentless dogma. They have no interest in compromising or finding a pragmatic solution. So they will accept another failure at a high-level global meeting and go back to their funders and members for more financial support while finding someone else to blame.
What a sad existence.