It goes without saying that oil and coal companies should not have a seat at the policy table for decisions on climate change. Their profits depend on business-as-usual and they’ll do everything in their power to undermine meaningful action.

But what about fertilizer companies? They are essentially the oil companies of the food world: the products they get farmers to pump into the soil are the largest source of green-house gas emissions from farming. Fertilizers, too, have their fortunes wrapped in agribusiness-as-usual and the expanded development of cheap sources of energy such as fracked shale gas.

Exxon and BP must envy the ease their fertilizer counterparts have had in infiltrating the climate change policy arena. When world leaders convened for the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris in December, only one major intergovernmental initiative emerged to deal with climate change and agriculture—and it was controlled by the world’s largest fertilizer companies.

The Global Alliance for Climate Smart Agriculture, launched at the 2014 United Nations (UN) Summit on Climate Change in New York, was the culmination of several years of efforts by the fertilizer lobby to block meaningful action on agriculture and climate change. The Alliance’s 29 non-governmental founding members included three fertilizer industry lobby groups, two of the world’s largest fertilizer companies (Yara of Norway and Mosaic of the United States), and a handful of organizations working directly with fertilizer companies on climate change programs. Today, 60 percent of the private sector members of the Alliance still come from the fertilizer industry.

Corporate smart agriculture

One possible explanation for the fertilizer industry’s successful policy coup is that its role in climate change is poorly understood and severely underestimated. People associate Shell, not Yara, with fracking. But in Europe, it is Yara that coordinates the corporate lobby for shale gas development, and it is Yara and other fertilizer companies that suck up most of the natural gas produced by the fracking boom in the United States

Fertilizers, especially nitrogen fertilizers, require an enormous amount of energy to produce. Estimates are that fertilizer production accounts for one to two percent of total global energy consumption and produces about the same share of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This production gets bigger every year. Supplies of nitrogen fertilizer, which is produced almost entirely from natural gas, are expected to grow nearly 4 percent per year over the next decade. And this production will increasingly rely on natural gas from fracked wells, which leak 40 to 60 percent more methane than conventional natural gas wells. (Methane is 25 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.)

Production, however, accounts for only a small fraction of the GHG emissions generated by chemical fertilizers. Most emissions occur once they are applied to the soil.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that for every 100 kg of nitrogen fertilizer applied to the soil, one kg ends up in the atmosphere as nitrous oxide (N2O), a gas that is 300 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas and is the world’s most significant ozone-depleting substance. In 2014, this was equivalent to the average annual emissions of 72 million cars driven in the US—about a third of the U.S. fleet of cars and trucks.

New research, however, shows that these alarming numbers are at least three to five times too low. The use of chemical fertilizers this year will likely generate more GHG emissions than the total emissions from all of the cars and trucks driven in the United States.

The fertilizer industry has long known that their chemicals are cooking the planet and a growing body of evidence shows that their products are not needed to feed the world. Farmers can stop using chemical fertilizers without reducing yields by adopting agroecological practices. This was the conclusion supported by the 2008 International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD)—a three-year intergovernmental process involving over 400 scientists that was sponsored by the World Bank and all of the relevant UN agencies.

Faced with this dilemma, the fertilizer companies have moved aggressively to control the international debate on agriculture and climate change, and to position themselves as a necessary part of the solution.