Earlier this week, EU officials said in unusually staunch terms that they would not buy Arctic oil and gas.
Even if someone (Norway) decided to drill new oil or gas wells in the Barents Sea, which is well above the Arctic Circle, the EU would not purchase it.
The goal is to dissuade investors. It costs many billions of euros to develop gas or oil at scale in the harsh conditions of the far north.
If there is no offtake market in continental Europe, no-one is going to take the risk.
The thing is, EU buyers already buy gas (and oil) from the Arctic. A lot of it.
Most of the gas, some 12 million tonnes so far this year, comes from Russia’s Yamal LNG plant, which sits on the shore of the biggest estuary you have never heard of, the Gulf of Ob (Obskaya Guba in Russian).
But that will end 10 weeks from now, when the EU ban on Russian LNG kicks in.
This article continues, but the full version is available only to EUobserver.com subscribers. Visit account.euobserver.com/membership
The European Parliament on Thursday (22 October) backed a three-year delay to the EU’s methane rules for oil and gas importers, two years more than the European Commission proposed last week.
MEPs also voted to extend the delay to European oil and gas producers, which goes beyond the commission’s plans.
The text now forms parliament’s position for negotiations with member states, whose ambassadors failed to agree on Wednesday.
Under the amendments, tabled by the conservative European People’s Party (EPP), importers would only have to prove that their oil and gas meets EU monitoring standards from 2031, instead of 2027 under the current law.
Reporting on methane intensity would also be delayed from 2028 to 2031.
A separate amendment from a cross-party group of 36 Romanian and Bulgarian MEPs, which also passed, delays reporting obligations for EU operators by three years, to 2030.
MEPs also approved an amendment, tabled by Dutch Socialist MEP Mohammed Chahim, that the extra time should not apply to oil, gas and coal from countries under EU sanctions, which in practice means Russia.
A far-right Patriots for Europe proposal to suspend the regulation altogether was rejected, as was a push by the conservative ECR group to delay parts of the rules even longer.
This article continues, but the full version is available only to EUobserver.com subscribers. Visit account.euobserver.com/membership
Last week, Elsene became the fifth municipality to vote for an end to fossil-fuel advertising, joining Saint-Gilles, Jette, Schaerbeek and Molenbeek.
Four of those five votes came in the space of just four months, and together, these municipalities are home to roughly 370,000 people: one-third of the Brussels-Capital Region’s population.
All five are making the same demand: that the Brussels region bans fossil-fuel advertising across the entire city, from metro stations to regional roads. More motions are already being tabled, and by the end of the year, a majority of Brussels’ 19 municipalities could be on record calling for a ban.
While local politicians are taking the lead, the outlook a little higher up the chain looks less promising.
Europe’s ad town and the EU’s lobby town
Everyday tens of thousands of officials, MEPs, assistants and diplomats brave Brussels morning rush hour on their way to work on the laws that will decide whether Europe meets its climate targets.
Along the way they pass numerous temptations, bus shelters and metro walls selling them petrol cars, weekend flights and gas contracts, normalising the ongoing mass-consumption of these products.
Once they reach their offices, they meet the same industry again, this time in person. The seven biggest oil and gas companies alone have declared lobbying budgets of almost €64m.
Fossil Free Politics research shows EU Commissioners and their cabinets had nearly 900 meetings with fossil fuel lobbyists in the last term. That’s nearly once every working day, showing just how embedded the industry is in the daily rhythm of Brussels life.
Some files come under particularly heavy pressure, with one egregious example being how a secretive alliance of eleven large multinational enterprises worked to tear down the EU’s flagship human rights and climate law last year, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).
Over 80 percent of all commission meetings with external interest representatives on this regulation involved fossil fuel lobbyists, and the European Parliament is no better. All 17 MEPs who called for the methane regulation to be reopened in an April 2026 letter to the commission had met with fossil fuel lobbyists in the preceding year.
And those are only the declared figures.
Lobbyists roaming the corridors
Safe to say, the real total is almost certainly higher. According to new research by Reclaim Finance, on two out of every three days, the fossil-fuel lobbyists present at the European Parliament had no meetings scheduled with MEPs. They roam the corridors and cafés in the building, aiming to bump into the MEPs they wish to influence.
The councillors behind these fossil ad ban motions are not pretending that a few billboards will single-handedly solve the climate crisis, but they refuse to continue letting public spaces be misused by the fossil, automotive and aviation industry to freely promote their propaganda; as for the latter, especially since the advertised destinations are often precisely those places that have been the victims of severe climate disruptions..
“The summer of 2026 was a painful awakening to the harsh reality of the consequences of the climate crisis,” said Mathias Gyselen, the Ecolo-Groen councillor who tabled Schaerbeek’s motion in September.
“Heatwaves, heat islands and heat deaths are unfortunately becoming the new normal in the city. Doing nothing is no longer an option.”
They are right. Advertising is how the fossil fuel industry keeps its social licence, presenting itself as part of the solution while expanding the very products driving the crisis.
Not just the five sub-municipalities of the Brussels capital acknowledge this, but over 70+ cities worldwide have taken steps to clear their streets from fossil fuel advertising, among them Amsterdam, Sydney, Stockholm and Edinburgh.
The problems with advertisements, and multi-million euro lobby strategies, are not just that they very much harm the planet, they are also fundamentally undemocratic.
Residents, community groups and civil society organisations cannot match the industry’s firepower. They do not have the budgets, the staff or the open doors that put them across the table from lawmakers week after week.
Europe has dealt with this before.
‘Godfathers of climate chaos’
Tobacco lobbyists no longer get privileged access to health ministers, nor can cigarette brands buy billboards. For many similar reasons the world wants to end fossil fuels, the EU banned tobacco advertising because promoting a deadly product was incompatible with public health.
UN secretary-general António Guterres made the same comparison in 2024 when he urged every country to ban fossil fuel advertising, naming fossil-fuel companies as the “godfathers of climate chaos”
Municipal motions are not binding, so the decision now lies with the Brussels-Capital Region, which controls advertising in the metro, along regional roads and on its own infrastructure. A first obvious step is that it should listen to its municipalities and introduce a city-wide ban.
But the message is also addressed to the institutions on the other side of the Rue de la Loi.
If the streets of Europe’s capital are being cleared of fossil fuel promotion, the corridors of its institutions should be too. That means limiting the industry’s access to decision-makers, closing the revolving door, and rejecting fossil fuel sponsorship and partnerships, just as the EU did with tobacco.
The municipalities of Brussels have shown what local democracy looks like. Now it is up to the region and the EU institutions to show that Europe’s capital is not for sale; not on its billboards, and not in its corridors of power.
Login
