05/03/2026
The success of the energy transition is jeopardised by political capture, or the idea that fossil fuel industry interests are controlling the narrative and elections of the debate around renewables.
By Alberto Alemanno, Founder of The Good Lobby, Professor HEC Paris
This speech was delivered at the IX Open Government Partnership (OGP) Global Summit, held in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, in October 2025, which brought together governments, civil society leaders, and policy experts from over 70 countries to advance transparency, accountability, and democratic participation. Speaking in a session focused on climate governance and the energy transition, Alberto Alemanno challenges the traditional understanding of regulatory capture, arguing that the core threat today is no longer policy capture but political capture. Against the backdrop of accelerating climate urgency and democratic backsliding, he outlines how fossil fuel interests increasingly shape political agendas, electoral outcomes, and public narratives – and proposes strategic pathways to counter this systemic obstruction of climate action.
The following speech has been lightly edited for length and style.
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Thank you for the invitation to speak. The question before us is how to protect against policy capture.
But I want to challenge the premise. We’re no longer dealing with policy capture. We’re dealing with political capture, and that changes everything. Political capture operates upstream of the policy process, which traditionally has been the focus of the OGP community’s attention.
What’s the difference?
- Policy capture is when industry weakens a specific regulation.
- Political capture is when industry controls what even gets debated, who gets elected, and what counts as common sense in the first place.
All our anti-capture tools of lobbying registers, transparency rules, and consultation processes operate at the policy level. Yet when politics itself is captured, these tools become irrelevant.
Let me give you a few concrete examples of the shift.
- On agenda setting: It’s not that oil companies are lobbying against carbon pricing. It is that carbon pricing never reaches the floor for a vote because fossil fuel-aligned parties control the legislative agenda.
- On financing: It’s not about a few revolving door appointments anymore. Entire political parties are financially dependent on fossil sector money and regional governments depend on extraction revenues. They literally cannot afford to govern without this funding.
- On narrative: Industry doesn’t need to dispute climate science anymore in hearings. They’ve won something bigger: they’ve captured the language we use. “Energy security” now automatically means more gas pipelines. “Affordability” means subsidizing fossil fuels. “Just transition” means going slowly for 30 years. These aren’t debated positions—they’re the assumed starting point.
- On implementation: Instead of lobbying against specific laws, we see constitutional challenges that tie up climate legislation in courts for years, strategic judicial appointments, and federal-state conflicts designed to paralyze any action.
Here’s the frustrating part: traditional anti-capture tools assume that if you shine light on the problem, you can fix it. But we now have complete transparency. We can see exactly who’s funding which politicians, we participate in every consultation, and we present irrefutable scientific evidence. Yet we still lose.
Why? It’s like having excellent security cameras on the front door while thieves come in through the basement. Our tools monitor the visible policy layer, but capture has moved to the invisible political layer underneath. The real decisions aren’t happening in those transparent policy processes. They’re happening upstream in political spaces these tools were never designed to reach.
One example is from our work at The Good Lobby. Our project, Decarb Lobbying, unveiled lobbying ties between fossil fuel companies and EU-based consultants. Through this project, we uncovered:
- How much these firms provide lobbying services to the fossil fuel industry,
- Whether these services conflict with the firms’ sustainability commitments, and
- The extent of the revenue dependency of the firms on this industry.
Our ranking aimed to name and shame the EU consultants taking money from fossil fuel companies. And it was picked up by the media, but it just didn’t prompt the type of reaction we expected.
The Paradox We Face
Now here’s what makes this moment particularly dangerous. The fossil fuel industry is economically weakening but politically strengthening.
Economically, the game is over. Solar and wind are now cheaper than new fossil fuel plants in most markets. Major banks are divesting, at least partly so. Insurance companies are pulling coverage. The stranded asset crisis is accelerating.
But politically? As the industry declines economically, it’s becoming more desperate and more aggressive. It’s using decades of accumulated political leverage while it still has it. Think of a wounded animal that is most dangerous when it’s cornered. That’s the paradox we’re facing now.
And here’s the problem: political systems adjust slower than markets. There is a dangerous lag. An industry in economic decline is wielding disproportionate political power to slow its own obsolescence.
This is why traditional “naming and shaming” campaigns stopped working. Fossil interests aren’t hiding. They operate openly because they’ve successfully normalized their political protection. Society now accepts the pushback against the energy transition as legitimate debate, not corporate capture.
What Actually Works
So given this reality, what can we actually do?
I see four approaches: accelerate the economic collapse, use courts when politics fails, go local when national politics are blocked, and split the business coalition.
Accelerate the Economic Collapse
I know that sounds harsh, but the realm of politics is captured because fossil interests still control enough money and jobs to create dependency. While we can’t break the political capture directly, we can destroy the economic foundation holding it up.
How?
One way is to build alternatives at scale. Every wind farm, solar installation, and battery facility is an economic fact that shifts political gravity. When renewables dominate energy investment and employment, the “jobs versus environment” narrative collapses. This speeds up what are called “stranded asset dynamics.”
We must also expose fiscal dependence. When governments rely on fossil revenues, call this what it is: a structural conflict of interest. Not a neutral budget item, but the root of capture.
Why does this work? Because politicians follow economic power. When fossil fuels become economically marginal, political protection becomes unsustainable.
Use Courts when Politics Fails
When political channels are captured, litigation becomes critical. Climate liability cases make delay expensive. Rights-based litigation bypasses captured legislatures entirely, because courts create binding obligations regardless of industry preference. Administrative challenges on specific projects slow fossil expansion, running out the clock on aging infrastructure.
This works because it only requires legal standing and evidence, not political will. And it buys time for economic fundamentals to shift further.
Go Local when National Politics are Blocked
Cities and regions can move when national governments won’t. This looks like municipalities buying renewable energy at scale, cities blocking fossil fuel infrastructure through zoning and mandating building electrification, and networks like C40 Cities sharing best practices and creating peer pressure.
This strategy exploits federalism to route around capture and expand the concept of sanctuary city beyond the usual sectoral policy areas. It creates competitive dynamics: regions demonstrating that climate action works economically, making national obstruction look backward.
Split the Business Coalition
The fossil fuel industry’s political power partly depends on presenting itself as “the economy versus the environment.” Shatter this.
There are massive economic interests misaligned with fossil protection. Once they mobilize politically, fossil fuel loses its monopoly on economic credibility:
- The insurance industry sees climate risk as existential.
- The renewable energy sector is now large enough to be a political force.
- Agriculture faces direct climate impacts.
- Real estate is exposed to coastal flooding and property devaluation.
- Advanced manufacturing needs cheap renewable energy to compete globally.
This isn’t a moral argument—it’s interest group politics. And it’s how capture actually gets broken.
On Open Government Tools
So where does this leave transparency and participation?
We need to be honest. In a captured political system, these tools won’t deliver democratic influence. Instead, we need to deploy them differently. There are three approaches to explore:
- Conduct consultations to document capture for future litigation, not to influence current decisions.
- Leverage transparency as opposition research. For example, freedom of information requests can help track money, map networks, and build legal cases.
- Use administrative procedures to delay harmful decisions, force the industry to spend its resources, and create public records.
In this context, the value of open government principles comes from their ability to defend against the fossil fuel industry. Through continued advocacy for greater transparency and participation in the energy transition, we can slow backsliding, create evidence against the fossil fuel industry, and buy more time to reverse political capture.
Conclusion
We do not have enough time to fix a captured political system while facing extreme threats from climate change.
Instead, we have to undermine this political capture in more indirect ways. One strategy is to accelerate fossil fuel’s economic decline until political capture becomes unsustainable. We can also build alternative power centers like cities, courts, and new business coalitions that can act despite national-level capture. We can use procedural tools defensively. And we can prepare institutional reforms for when the political opening comes.
The energy transition will happen through economic displacement first, political change second. Not the reverse.
The race is whether we reach economic tipping points before captured politics locks in catastrophic outcomes. The good news? Renewables are winning economically faster than predicted. The question is whether we can prevent political institutions from sabotaging what markets are already doing.
Thank you.