Since the 1950s, the fossil fuel industry has known the damage its products cause. Exxon’s scientists predicted melting ice caps and flooded cities; Shell warned of “catastrophic” risks in 1991. Rather than act, they funded campaigns to undermine science, shift blame, and delay action. As our background note shows, the five largest oil and gas companies spent over $1 billion on misleading branding and lobbying in just three years after the Paris Agreement.

When outright denial lost credibility, fossil fuel corporations rebranded themselves as climate champions — a textbook move in the corporate capture playbook. Net zero pledges, carbon capture schemes, and “nature-based” solutions now dominate policy spaces, crowding out real, rights-based measures. These “burn now, pay later” strategies buy time for polluters while locking in harmful projects.

The scale of the deception is staggering: “The fossil fuel industry alone would require 500 million hectares of land — an area one and a half times the size of India, and a third of all global cropland — to offset their emissions by 2050.” Meanwhile, 93% of companies with net zero pledges are set to miss their targets, even as they expand fossil fuel production. Corporate capture ensures that these false solutions remain at the center of negotiations, shaping global policy to protect profits, not people.

Nature-based solutions often mean turning ecosystems into carbon credits and displacing the very people who have cared for them for generations. In Kenya, the Northern Kenya Grassland Carbon Project was declared unconstitutional after a court found serious human rights abuses against Indigenous communities.

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, former UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples, put it plainly: “Forests thrive when Indigenous Peoples remain on their customary lands and have legally recognised rights to manage and protect them.”

“Real solutions must tackle the root causes of climate injustices and dismantle systemic inequalities,” the background note emphasises. Around the world, communities are already leading the way — from micro-hydro projects in the Philippines’ Cordillera region to grassroots women’s movements in Pakistan and Burma building resilience to climate-induced loss and damage. Ending the climate crisis is about justice, not carbon markets. 

ESCR-Net members gathered in a global webinar to expose how the fossil fuel industry, through corporate capture, profits from the climate crisis while imposing harmful “solutions” on frontline communities. They emphasized that these false solutions are deliberate strategies rooted in colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, and shared collective points of resistance by asking: “What do we resist?” and “Why do we resist?”.