Brazil In Talks W. Global Oil Whores Extraordinaire Edelman To Run PR For Next Climate Conference

[hatrack]

Edelman, the world’s largest public relations agency, is in talks to work with the Cop30 team organising the UN climate summit in the Amazon later this year despite its prior connections to a major trade group accused of lobbying to roll back measures to protect the area from deforestation, the Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting can reveal. The summit is set to take place in November in the city of Belém on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, which has been ravaged by deforestation linked to Brazil’s powerful agriculture industry. For the first time, the talks will be “at the epicenter of the climate crisis”, the summit’s president wrote last week. “As the Cop comes to the Amazon, forests will naturally be a central topic,” he added.

But now questions are being asked about a possible conflict of interest after his team confirmed to the Guardian and CCR that it is considering bringing in the American PR giant Edelman to work on the summit. As well as its past work with some of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies, Edelman previously developed a “communications strategy” and message “playbook” for a trade group representing major players in the Brazilian soy industry, according to US Foreign Agent Registration Act filings.

“Edelman’s conflicts of interest at a climate conference are almost too many to count,” said Duncan Meisel, executive director of Clean Creatives, which campaigns for the PR and ad industry to cut ties with fossil fuel clients. He said the agency “maintains at least a dozen contracts with fossil fuel polluters like Shell and Chevron”.

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If Edelman were to ultimately win a bid to work on Cop30 in Brazil, it would be the second time in three years it has been closely involved in efforts to deliver one of the major UN climate summits. Edelman was hired by the United Arab Emirates team hosting Cop28 in Dubai in 2023. One of Edelman’s managing directors – a former deputy press secretary for Donald Trump during his first term – was working as the summit’s president Sultan Al Jaber’s “media support”, according to an internal Cop28 document previously reported by CCR. The agency’s work with Al Jaber, who alongside his role as the UAE’s climate envoy now heads the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, dates back to the mid-2000s, DoJ filings show. Edelman’s work on Cop28 came after a period of intense scrutiny of the agency’s relationship with one of the world’s biggest oil producers, ExxonMobil, and other major fossil fuel companies.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/17/edelman-cop30-amazon-summit

[Think. Again.]

1. The annual U.N. Conference of the Parties (COP)...

....has become an annual Climate misinformation and PR spin workshop dominated by the fossil fuel industry.

The COP meetings should be either stopped by the U.N. or drastically reset to include only legitimate discussions on actual Climate change science and solutions.

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2. I'm to the point where I hope the rainforest is on fire for this year's meeting . . . .

And they all end up stumbling down the new superhighway that's going to be built to link Belem to other roads, choking as they go.