On Thursday, London based non-profit Influence Map released a report detailing a global campaign by ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, and Total to stall international efforts to mitigate climate change.

To provide context for this report, below is a brief timeline of international efforts to address climate change:

1988 — The United Nations establishes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to “provide policymakers with regular scientific assessments on the current state of knowledge about climate change.”

1990 — The IPCC releases its first assessment report, detailing “the importance of climate change as a challenge with global consequences and requiring international cooperation.”

1992 — The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is adopted, laying the groundwork for future international cooperation to address climate change.

1992 — The UNFCCC secretariat (UN Climate Change) is established with the adoption of the Framework Convention on Climate Change. By 2019, UN Climate Change will employ about 450 staff at its office in Germany.

1997 — The Kyoto Protocol, which creates legally binding targets for developed nations to reduce emissions, is signed by 84 nations.

2001 — George W. Bush withdraws the U.S. from the Kyoto Protocol, which is never ratified and has little impact on global emissions over the coming decades.

2009 — UN negotiators and international leaders fail to make progress on a plan to reduce global emissions at a summit in Copenhagen.

2016 — The Paris Agreement is signed by all 195 member and observer states of the United Nations under the UNFCCC, encouraging all parties to go beyond their current goals and eliminate enough emissions to limit average global temperature increases to 1.5–2 C above pre-industrial levels.

2017 — Donald Trump withdraws the United States from the Paris Agreement, describing it as “an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries.”

Global carbon emissions hit at an all-time high in 2018, just two years after an international agreement was adopted in hopes of reducing them. That may be bad news for humanity, but it’s a sure sign that the CEOs of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies are doing just fine.

Influence Map’s report highlights well funded efforts by these executives to sway public opinion and policy in favor of their bottom lines.

Excerpts from the report’s executive summary include:

“The research reveals a trend of carefully devised campaigns of positive messaging combined with negative policy lobbying on climate change. The aim is to maintain public support on the issue while holding back binding policy.” “This spending accompanies the expansion of the companies’ operations with combined annual sales of over $1Tn and profits of $55Bn 2018, the vast majority of which is oil and gas related. Combined capital investment will increase to $115Bn in 2019 but only about 3% of this will go to low carbon investments, according to company disclosures.” “The most important part of this campaign activity is the nearly $200M per year spent on lobbying designed to control, delay, or block binding climate-motivated policy. This lobbying has hindered governments globally in their efforts to implement such policies post-Paris, which according to the latest IPCC report of 2018 are crucial to meet climate targets and keep warming below 1.5°C.”

Reacting to the report on Twitter, British environmental activist George Monbiot tweeted “this is #Ecocide. In a just world, it would be treated as a crime against humanity — and against the rest of the living planet.”

While it may technically be correct that a crime is being committed, if there’s any lesson from the past few decades of international attempts to reduce the impacts of climate change it’s that nobody is going to prosecute them anytime soon.