How Big Oil broke the UN climate system, and still controls it

Even as scientists warn of a red line climate catastrophe, global UN summits like the latest one in Brazil keep stumbling. The reason isn’t always a lack of will. It’s a system built so that a single country, or the fossil fuel industry behind it, can block real change. That’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

Most democratic systems make decisions by simple majority vote, or at most by a two-thirds majority for major actions. The UN climate system works on an unusual demand -- every country must agree. There has to be consensus on every little thing, not just the big decisions.

Flawed from the beginning

The oddity goes back to the very beginning of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. When negotiators met in the early 1990s, they failed to adopt Rule 42 of the draft procedures – mainly due to opposition from some oil-producing countries – which would have enabled majority voting when consensus failed. Since it was never approved, it has never applied. The result is that the UN climate process operates almost entirely by consensus.

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This is not a technical detail. It means one country, any country, can veto a strong decision. Any single country can stop a proposal, delay strong language, or force a weaker compromise. A process meant to protect the smallest nations has become a tool for the world's biggest polluters, responsible for global warming. Studies on decision-making in climate negotiations show that consensus often yields the lowest common denominator.

Major oil-producing countries understood this early and worked hard to ensure the rule stayed frozen. Over the years, the United States, Saudi Arabia and other member of the OPEC+ cartel have repeatedly signalled that any shift away from consensus would be unacceptable. Their insistence kept the rule locked in place, and the talks locked in slow motion.

How polluters shaped the system

This procedural trap did not appear by itself. Here is where it’s gets darker. By the late 1970s, companies like Exxon had already produced internal research showing fossil fuels were heating up the planet. A 2023 study examined Exxon’s own documents and found that its scientists accurately predicted global warming trends decades before the public understood them.

But, instead of warning the world, the oil and gas industry funded campaigns to create doubt. These companies publicly questioned climate science while privately accepting it. Think tanks and political groups were funded to portray climate action as uncertain, extreme or harmful to national interests.

This long-running strategy shaped the environment in which climate negotiations unfolded. If the science itself looked uncertain, governments could justify delay. And, in a system that required every country to agree, delay was often all that was needed.

From denial to manipulation

The tactics of the fossil fuel industry have changed with the media landscape. Climate denial is now less about rejecting science outright and more about distracting, confusing or overwhelming people with misleading content. Recent studies by groups such as Climate Action Against Disinformation and Brazil’s Climainfo Institute show that the industry’s communication networks continue to target key moments like global climate summits.

Ahead of the COP30 summit in Belém, researchers found coordinated digital advertising on platforms such as Google that cast doubt on climate policies and promoted fossil-fuel narratives tuned for Brazilian audiences. These were not small efforts. They were targeted, data-driven attempts to weaken public support for strong climate action in the host country.

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The UN and UNESCO have now recognised this as a threat to global cooperation. Their joint Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms warn that disinformation is undermining democratic debate and international negotiations. They have now called for stronger public-interest safeguards. But these attempts are still new, and the scale of industry influence remains far larger.

Consensus as a weapon

If the digital sphere is the new front, the UN negotiating room remains the old one, and it still carries the same weaknesses. Because the process requires unanimity, a single country aligned with fossil interests can block proposals that would help speed up the shift away from oil, gas and coal.

This has happened repeatedly. Language on phasing out fossil fuels, limiting subsidies, setting firm timelines or tightening reporting rules has been repeatedly delayed or watered down because one or two producers said no. Sometimes, those objections come from diplomatic allies of the oil industry rather than producers themselves. The effect is the same.

The process of consensus was meant to protect countries most vulnerable to the climate emergency. Instead, it has often protected the world’s most powerful polluters. And the industry knows it.

The implications of this are not abstract. Every weak global agreement on climate action leaves more communities exposed to damaging heat, drought, floods and hunger. Every stalled decision leaves the world more dependent on fuels whose pollution is already harming millions of people each year.

Ahead of the COP30 summit in Belém, researchers found coordinated digital advertising on platforms such as Google that cast doubt on climate policies and promoted fossil-fuel narratives tuned for Brazilian audiences

The UN climate system was built to pursue collective action. But the rule that demands everyone has to agree has repeatedly allowed powerful interests to hold the world back.

Path out of the trap

Repairing this will require a level of clarity, and courage, that the annual global talks have not yet shown.

First, the UNFCCC must finally address the unfinished business of Rule 42. Even allowing majority voting in rare cases where consensus fails could unblock years of paralysis. Some legal scholars argue that the annual climate summits could adopt such a rule by majority decision, even if some members object, because the current blockage is itself a procedural gap.

Second, transparency around lobbying must increase sharply. The UN climate process still allows hundreds of fossil fuel lobbyists to attend without clear disclosure rules. Advocacy groups such as Transparency International have proposed straightforward reporting standards that would make influence more visible and less overwhelming.

Third, governments must treat digital manipulation as a direct threat to climate cooperation. The new guidelines by the UN and UNESCO provide a start, but countries need to enforce transparency on political advertising and prevent coordinated disinformation networks from shaping public opinion around crucial summits.

These actions will not solve everything. They would, however, end the illusion that a system tied to consensus can deliver rapid action in a world shaped by powerful industries with too much to lose.

Big Oil understood the weaknesses of the UN climate system before most governments did. It used them well. The question now is whether the world is willing to fix a process that was slowed from the moment it began, and whether we can move faster than those who still hope to keep it that way.

(The author is reporting from the ongoing UN climate summit, COP30, in Belem, Brazil)