13 December 2006 

Tonight in Brussels ExxonMobil and DG Internal Market were 'named and shamed' after topping the polls in the “Worst EU Lobby Awards 2006”. The winners of the awards were publicly announced at a ceremony organised by Corporate Europe Observatory, Friends of the Earth Europe, LobbyControl and Spinwatch.

In the "Worst EU Lobbying" category, ExxonMobil was the clear winner, gaining almost half of the votes cast. The oil giant continues to pay climate sceptics to manipulate the climate debate in Brussels. In this last week though there has been a subtle change of tack by some of the better known climate deniers, who now claim that economics dictate that we shouldn't do anything about climate change because India and China will simply carry on with carbon.

Julian Morris, executive director of the International Policy Network, urged governments to be cautious. "There needs to be better data before billions of pounds are spent on policy measures that may havelittle impact," he told the Daily Telegraph earlier this week. Other Exxon funded groups in the news this week a pushing a similar line.

Stephen Pollard, from the Centre for the New Europe  told the Times on December 09 "My think-tank has a number of climate-change sceptics. On that, I'm with the received wisdom. I think it's real, is frightening and is largely man-made. So I'm changing our formal stance and making clear that as an organisation we think it's real." However Pollard's 'conversion' was not as dramatic as it might appear, given that he folwed this up by stating "But that's not the same as believing that Kyoto offers all the answers. There are other ideas, too, that can be pro-business and pro-growth." 

"ExxonMobil have continued to fund climate sceptics despite heavy criticism both in Europe and the United States. ExxonMobil thereby intentionally creates an artificial dispute about human-made global warming to obstruct political measures aimed at reducing CO2 emissions." explained Ulrich Mueller from LobbyControl. "Moreover, in Europe, where transparency obligations are almost non-existent, it seems ExxonMobil still fails to disclose all those it funds. The impressive public response to the online poll shows that the public are worried by these kind of tactics".

Hopefully the shame of the Worst Lobby Award won by Exxon will mean the media, politicians and officials begin to treat the output of fronts like the Centre for the New Europe and IPN more critically.

In the category for the public official or institution that has granted the “Worst Privileged Access”, DG Internal Market got an even bigger share of the votes.  This powerful European Commission department manipulated its stakeholder consultation process to legitimise its own controversial proposal for a single European patent system by marginalising critics.

Over 9400 people took part in an online poll to decide the winners of the awards.