Equinor hosts a breakfast reception at the House of Lords; Fossil Free Parliament calls on MPs and Peers to reject the invitation

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StopRosebank campaigners protest Equinor’s involvement at a TED climate conference in London, 6 Oct 2022

On Thursday 22nd June 2023, all Parliamentarians were invited to a breakfast reception at the House of Lords, where Norwegian oil giant Equinor’s Senior Vice President and Chief Economist, Eirik Wærness, presented an update to Equinor’s “Energy Perspectives” report.

The invitation refers to Energy Perspectives as an “independent report” (prepared by Equinor analysts…) that sets out a range of “possible contrasting pathways” up to 2050, to provide a “platform for debate and decision-making”. In the report, Equinor states that the Russian war against Ukraine is making the 1.5 degree global heating limit ambition “increasingly difficult to achieve”. While Equinor has been pushing the UK Government to support their plans to develop Rosebank – the largest undeveloped oil and gas field in the North Sea – the subtext of this report is clearly an argument for continued fossil fuel extraction to ensure energy security, at the cost of accelerated devastation to our climate.

In response, Fossil Free Parliament collaborated with the StopRosebank campaign on a Twitter storm and email campaign – encouraging members of the public to contact their MPs to ask them to boycott the reception, thereby denying Equinor the special privilege of presenting its arguments directly to MPs. Given that the response was coordinated at short notice, we were thrilled that 7 MPs stated that they would reject the invitation: