New Delhi: There’s a record number of fossil fuel lobbyists roaming the halls of COP30. A report released by the group Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO) showed that there are 1,602 fossil fuel lobbyists at COP30. This means that one in 25 participants of the COP are lobbyists.KBPO is a coalition of more than 450 organisations united in demanding an end to the ability of Big Polluters to write the rules of climate action. Every year, the coalition analyses the number of fossil fuel lobbyists at the annual United Nations climate change conference. This year too, the team analysed the provisional list of participants at COP30 line-by-line, and name-by-name.Their analysis revealed that 1,602 fossil fuel lobbyists are attending COP30. This significantly outnumbers the participants that almost any country delegation has sent to COP30. Only Brazil (3,805) has sent more participants to the conference.Proportionally, the number of fossil fuel lobbyists at COP30 is a 12% increase from last year’s climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan. According to the KBPO, this is the largest concentration of fossil fuel lobbyists at COP since they started analysing conference attendees.Fossil fuel lobbyists have received two-thirds more passes to COP30 than all the delegates from the ten most climate vulnerable nations combined (1,061). The International Emissions Trading Association has brought 60 representatives, including delegates from oil and gas giants ExxonMobil, BP and TotalEnergies, to COP30.According to the KBPO, some countries from the global north also included fossil fuel representatives in their official delegations. France, for example, brought 22 fossil fuel delegates (five from TotalEnergies, including CEO Patrick Pouyanne).“It’s common sense that you cannot solve a problem by giving power to those who caused it,” said KBPO member Jax Bonbon in a statement. “Yet three decades and 30 COPs later, more than 1,500 fossil fuel lobbyists are roaming the climate talks as if they belong here … COP30 promises to be an ‘Implementation COP’, yet it has so far failed to implement even a basic and long-overdue demand of kicking Big Polluters out of a conference meant to address the crisis they created.”