Welcome back to Drill, I'm Amy Westvelt.

The Conference of the Parties or CUP, the annual global UN climate negotiations,

have kicked off in Egypt, and I'll be digging into a few aspects of it over the next couple of weeks.

This week, I want to talk about greenwashing and how it's made its way into these proceedings

really since they began back in the early 90s.

You might remember a guy named E. Bruce Harrison, who's come up quite a bit in this podcast over the years.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Harrison saw these international climate meetings coming a mile away,

and he helped his oil and gas clients strategize to ensure that climate commitments would always be voluntary, not mandatory.

He created an industry group called the Global Climate Coalition, whose job was to make sure that international climate talks never resulted in anything binding.

Here's Brown University Environmental Sociologist Bob Bruehl explaining the GCC's role.

I mean, the GCC supported the passage of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

They supported that in 92, because it was toothless.

Oh, yes, we need to wrap further study.

And of course, we need to do this and everything will be voluntary.

And then of course, when Clinton says mandatory, they go, oh, no, no, no, you can't have that.

They lobby like hell and get a voluntary action plan, voluntary initiatives to reduce carbon emissions.

So by 92, we already have, they already got a government, they already got an organization.

They've got their rhetoric down, they've got their organization down.

There is a playbook.

When the world did get close to enacting a binding treaty on climate, the Kyoto Protocol, back in 1997,

it was the GCC that killed it. Here's Bruehl again.

These are the guys like, whoa, what do we do?

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