One of the UK’s biggest water companies is fighting a legal battle to block public access to data on treated sewage it is discharging into Windermere in the Lake District.

United Utilities initially claimed that data from phosphorus monitors at sewage treatment works at the lake “was not environmental information”. It later claimed the information on phosphorus – which can pollute watercourses when at high levels – was “internal communication” and exempt from disclosure.

It is also trying to block the release of data on ammonia checks from a plant at Cunsey Beck where hundreds of fish were killed in a pollution incident in 2022 that was caused by an unknown source. The water company is fighting the rulings by the freedom of information watchdog to disclose all the data to the public.

Matt Staniek, the founder of the Save Windermere campaign, said it was “disgraceful” that United Utilities was repeatedly blocking the public from access to environmental information on potential pollutants. The water company has not commented on the costs to date of fighting the cases.

“United Utilities is withholding information which would tell us even more about the true impact of discharges of raw and treated sewage into Windermere,” he said. “There is an overwhelming public interest in understanding how a water company is polluting England’s largest lake.”

David Black, the chief executive of Ofwat, the water regulator, said earlier this year that he expected water firms to have a culture of transparency. “Customers have paid companies to install monitors and collect their data,” he said. “They have a right to see what it says.”

The legal battle comes as a new report obtained by the Observer reveals that United Utilities has presided over suspected illegal sewage spills for more than 500 days over a period from 2018 to 2023 in Windermere and the surrounding area. The analysis by expert Peter Hammond is based on data obtained by Save Windermere and the Windrush Against Sewage Pollution campaign.

Windermere is on the frontline in the sewage scandal that has polluted so many of the UK’s rivers, coastal waters and lakes. Residents in Windermere say England’s largest lake is now regularly blighted by blooms of potentially toxic blue-green algae, which are fuelled by sewage pollution.

Save Windermere requested data in January from phosphorus monitors on treated effluent at Windermere’s wastewater treatment works on the eastern side of the lake. It is concerned that treated effluent may be threatening the ecology of the lake, as well as raw sewage discharges. United Utilities refused to release the information under the environmental information regulations, classifying it as internal communications. It also tried to claim it was not environmental information.

It said the information was “non-regulatory” and was collected for operational purposes, and may not be as accurate as regulated sampling. It said it was not in the public interest to disclose the information because it might inhibit “free and frank” discussions and have a “chilling effect” on site management.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) ruled that the information should be disclosed, concluding: “If the phosphorus monitoring is accurate enough to be used for operational purposes … and to indicate the level of toxins present in the water, there is a public interest in this information.” The ICO has also ruled that United Utilities should disclose information it was withholding on ammonia sampling data and turbidity data (measuring cloudiness in water) at Near Sawrey wastewater treatment works on Cunsey Beck, a site of special scientific interest which flows into Windermere.

In June 2022, hundreds of fish were killed in a pollution incident at Cunsey Beck, which receives discharges from the sewage works. A cause for the fish kill was never established by the Environment Agency, but its investigation was later found in an independent report to have been undermined by a series of failings.

United Utilities is appealing to the first tier tribunal against the decisions to disclose the information requested by Save Windermere. A hearing on the cases, which are likely to be joined, is expected early next year.

Last month, United Utilities was reprimanded by the ICO for failing to properly handle requests from the public on environmental information. It said there had been numerous cases where “United Utilities has erroneously refused to deal with a request for information on the basis that the information being requested isn’t environmental”.

United Utilities said it is more committed to being more transparent and making information even more accessible. It says it will continue to engage with ICO processes.

A Russian spy ship has been escorted out of the Irish Sea after it entered Irish-controlled waters and patrolled an area containing critical energy and internet submarine pipelines and cables.

It was spotted on Thursday east of Dublin and south-west of the Isle of Man but Norwegian, US, French and British navy and air defence services initially observed it accompanying a Russian warship, the Admiral Golovko, through the English channel last weekend.

The Irish navy ship the LÉ James Joyce escorted it out of the Irish exclusive economic zone (EEZ) at about 3am on Friday with the air corps continuing to monitor its movements as it headed south.

Its presence has raised fresh concerns about the security of the interconnector cables that run between Ireland and the UK carrying global internet traffic from huge datacentres operated by tech companies including Google and Microsoft, which have their EU headquarters sited in Ireland.

The sighting of the Russian intelligence ship came as British defence forces monitored other Russian vessels near its eastern coastal waters. On Thursday, British jets were also scrambled to monitor a Russian reconnaissance aircraft flying close to UK airspace, the Ministry of Defence said.

The ship was also spotted on Monday and Tuesday west of Cork, where there are another set of connectors between Ireland and France, some offering transatlantic interconnection.

At one point it was positioned just inside the Irish EEZ, 5-7km (3.1 to 4.3 miles) north of the cables connecting Ireland and the UK.

Edward Burke, an assistant professor in the history of war at University College Dublin, told the Examiner the situation was alarming.

“Once again we see the Russian navy probing the defences of western Europe. It’s yet another wake-up call – one that we shouldn’t need – that Ireland needs to bolster its naval capabilities and deepen its maritime security partnerships in Europe,” he said.

It is understood defence forces in Ireland observed the ship operating three drones over Irish waters, raising fears it was conducting surveillance.

Concerns over critical infrastructure around Europe have been raised on multiple occasions this year after the alleged sabotage of the Baltic gas pipeline and undersea internet cables between Finland and Estonia. In August, China admitted that a Hong Kong-flagged ship damaged the pipeline but said it was accidental.

The Yantar is officially classed as an auxiliary general oceanographic research vessel with underwater rescue capabilities. It is tasked by an arm of the Russian defence ministry and is separate from its navy.

It can deploy deep-diving submersibles and has been seen operating close to seabed infrastructure on a number of occasions by open source intelligence analysts, according to Navy Lookout intelligence analysts. The analysts said the ship’s mission was “probably more about strategic signalling and intelligence gathering” than sabotage.

Irish and British defence forces have worked together since the vessels entered waters off the coast of the UK with a significant multinational operation put in place.

The Yantar was travelling with Golovko and a tanker, Vyazma, and both vessels were monitored throughout their journey in the English channel by RFA Tideforce and HMS Iron Duke.

They then handed over surveillance to the French as it headed out of the English channel with the British navy also shadowing another Russian vessel heading north towards the Baltics.

When the Yantar broke away from the Golovko and headed north into the Irish sea, it was shadowed by HMS Cattistock, with the operation becoming public when the ship activated its automatic identification for about four minutes on Thursday when it was south of the Isle of Man.

According to reports, it switched off its transponders transmitting its position after entering the Irish EEZ but the Irish vessel continued to shadow it.

They tried to make contact with the ship but Russian personnel did not respond and at about 3am on Friday it left the waters and headed south.

A sheriff’s deputy from the US state of Tennessee is facing criminal charges and reportedly quit his job after he fatally shot seven dogs whose wellbeing he had been sent to check on.

Connor Brackin, 24, was on duty for the McNairy county sheriff’s office on 4 November when he was tasked with going to a home in Bethel Springs to check the condition of some dogs there, the Tennessee bureau of investigation (TBI) said in a recent statement.

The TBI said Brackin arrived and released one of the dogs to the person who called and asked for the animals’ welfare to be checked on, but the reasons for that were not made clear. Then, for reasons that remain under investigation, Bracken began firing his service gun and shot seven dogs on the property to death, the TBI alleged.

Local prosecutors on 7 November asked the TBI to investigate the animals’ killings. And on Tuesday, investigators obtained a warrant to arrest Brackin on seven counts of aggravated cruelty to animals as well as eight of reckless endangerment.

Brackin subsequently turned himself over to authorities at the jail operated by the sheriff’s office that employed him, and he was booked. He later bonded out of custody to await the resolution of the charges pending against him.

In Tennessee, aggravated cruelty to animals and reckless endangerment can each carry between one and six years in prison.

USA Today reported on Friday that Brackin had resigned from working for the McNairy sheriff’s office, citing information from the agency. He had worked at the sheriff’s office for nearly a month before his departure, according to the outlet.

The Guardian left a message requesting comment at a telephone number that was associated with Brackin and available on a public records database. The message was not immediately answered.

Bethel Springs is about 100 miles (161km) east of Memphis. It has a population of less than 750 people, according to the 2020 census.

At least 480 lobbyists working on carbon capture and storage (CCS) have been granted access to the UN climate summit, known as Cop29, the Guardian can reveal.

That is five more CCS lobbyists than were present at last year’s climate talks, despite the overall number of participants shrinking significantly from about 85,000 to about 70,000.

CCS lobbyists at Cop29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, outnumber the core national delegations from powerful nations including the US and Canada. Nearly half of the lobbyists were granted access as members of national delegations, affording them greater access to negotiations, including 55 who were invited as “guests” by the Azerbaijani government, which is hosting this year’s climate summit, and given what some at the conference are calling “red-carpet treatment.”

The figure, calculated by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) and shared exclusively with the Guardian, comes amid concern from activists that the climate summit is too heavily featuring “false solutions”.

“We are witnessing fossil-fuel greenwashing by those attempting to delay the inevitable fossil fuels phase-out,” said Rachel Kennerley, a campaigner at CIEL. “This large presence of lobbyists is a confirmation that the carbon capture industry is working hard to promote the misguided CCS technology. But governments and companies simply cannot ‘clean’ their coal, oil, and gas by capturing and ‘managing’ emissions.”

On Friday, it was revealed that 1,773 coal, oil, and gas lobbyists have been granted access to the climate talks, including 132 invited by the host country, as the Guardian reported.

CCS has been heavily promoted at Cop29, and has also featured heavily in national decarbonisation plans submitted this week, including the UK’s and the UAE’s.

The oil and gas industry has long advocated for CCS. If it is treated as a primary vehicle for decarbonisation, it could allow companies to continue selling fossil fuels and thereby preserve their main business models.

But activists have long derided the technology, noting it does not yet exist at scale and doesn’t the local harms of fossil fuel extraction, and that it can be dangerous. And despite its branding as a climate solution, it has so far mostly been used to recover carbon from oil wells and then inject it back underground to help squeeze more fuel from depleted fields – a process known as enhanced oil recovery.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading climate authority, has said CCS – or CCUS, which includes carbon “utilisation” for fertiliser production or enhanced oil recovery – should play a role in global decarbonisation plans. But last year, the group’s leader said that over-reliance on the technologies could lead the world to surpass climate tipping points.

In 2022, the research organisation Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found underperforming carbon capture projects outnumbered successful ones by large margins. This year, they found the use of fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage is unlikely to be economically competitive with renewable-based solutions.

“The significant number of CCS lobbyists at Cop29 highlights the fossil fuel industry’s substantial investment in attempting to secure its future, despite the urgent need to phase out fossil fuels,” Kennerley said. “Investing in this expensive and unreliable technology will lock in fossil fuels and waste precious time and money that we cannot afford. Large-scale CCS transport and storage also comes with significant health and safety risks.”

Negotiators approved rules on the use of carbon markets on the first day of the negotiations this week. Carbon market rules fall under article 6 of the 2016 Paris climate agreement, and a subsection of article 6 allows for carbon credits to stem from emissions reductions and removals. CIEL is concerned that the subsection could open the door for the increased reliance on CCS. And the campaigners worry that lobbyists are pushing negotiators to enshrine rules that could boost financing for the technologies.

For the analysis, CIEL pored over the UN’s list of individuals registered to attend Cop29 and disclosed affiliations, totalling up all those who were involved in CCS and CCUS projects as per an International Energy Agency database, and other companies and organisations that have a public track record advocating for the technologies.

Fossil fuel industry documents released by a 2021 US congressional investigation suggest that oil bosses have long been aware of CCUS’s limitations – and its potential as a lifeline for fossil fuels.

The Guardian has contacted the Global CCS Institute and the CCS Association for comment.

Sitting in the folds of the Essex countryside at the end of a sunken lane, the modest home of writer Ronald Blythe is to become an unlikely nature reserve.

When he died in 2023 at the age of 100 the acclaimed author of Akenfield, a classic account of rapidly changing rural life in the 1960s, left his ancient farmhouse to Essex Wildlife Trust.

Bottengoms, an overgrown garden home to badgers, hornets and the occasional singing nightingale, will be opened up as a sanctuary for people and wildlife – a place of education and inspiration for writers and artists, young and old.

The three-up, three-down yeoman farmer’s house, which in part dates back to the 15th century, was bequeathed to Blythe in 1977 by the artists John and Christine Nash who had moved there in the 1940s, meaning it has hosted 80 years of artistic endeavour.

“It’s not our natural territory but it’s an amazing gift for the trust,” said Rich Yates, the chief executive of Essex Wildlife Trust. “Ronnie is an icon of nature writing and we need him to be an icon of nature conservation too. If conservation is going to be successful it needs the best creative minds working for its cause. John Nash and Ronnie wanted it to be a place where nature and art could intersect – not just writing and painting but any artistic forms that have a nature conservation message.”

The house’s new role will include welcoming visiting schoolchildren and students. Essex Wildlife Trust, working closely with an advisory group featuring Blythe’s biographer Ian Collins alongside writers and academics Jules Pretty and James Canton, says it welcomes further ideas for how Bottengoms can connect people, nature and artistic creation.

Blythe was famously hospitable, and local children used to camp in his garden while young writers made pilgrimages to his – always open – door. He once happily allowed your Guardian correspondent to perch in a tree in his garden one evening to watch the badgers living below.

When the trust opens the house to visitors – after a programme of much-needed repairs – it will not host high volumes. “It’s not practical and it’s not in keeping with the spirit of the place – people need to be able to come and commune with the spirit of Ronnie,” said Yates. “I think of him as a modern-day Peter Pan or Tom Bombadil from Tolkien – the spirit of the countryside, some force of nature. And Bottengoms is the architectural expression of that. You need to have an experience of Ronnie when you come here.”

The house has the quality of an elixir, thinks Collins, whose new biography of Blythe’s remarkable life has received glowing reviews.

Blythe was born in 1922 and grew up in grinding rural poverty – so poor his family relied on straw from their cousins to stuff their mattresses. Lacking a university education, he read voraciously, and became friends with a lively bohemian artistic set including EM Forster and painters John Nash and Cedric Morris, whose home, Benton End, is nearby.

Akenfield, Blythe’s stark and poetic portrait of a Suffolk village at the time of the second agricultural revolution, was a smash hit: 15 million people watched the film adaptation when it was broadcast in 1975.

“He’s given all these marginalising labels – a rural writer, a Christian writer. He’s just a great writer,” said Collins. “He’s John Clare, he’s Thomas Hardy, he’s completely wonderful and he got better. Most of his books are published from his 80th year, including his best ones. He possessed an amazingly light, philosophical and time-travelling perspective in 400-word essays that connected the universe.”

According to Collins, the good health and tranquility Blythe found here helped him live long, and in astonishingly good mental and physical health.

“There is an amazing feeling of health and wellbeing in this place,” said Collins. “Ronnie never took an aspirin or paracetamol until he was 90. It was ridiculous when we gave him a panic button towards the end of his life because this was a man who never panicked. I’m sure my blood pressure goes down in this house and this garden.”

Blythe celebrated his 100th birthday at Bottengoms two years ago with the publication of Next to Nature, a compilation of his weekly columns about rural life, ancient and modern, with admiring contributions from writers including Vikram Seth and Richard Mabey.

Blythe was cared for by a circle of friends he called “dear ones” until he died peacefully at home in January 2023.

His friends were then amazed to discover that Blythe, who never lived with anyone, never learned to drive and rarely travelled, left a fortune of £500,000 squirrelled away in 20 savings accounts. This will help fund the urgent repairs required on the house.

“From the moment he was working as a writer – from 1955 – he paid his way,” said Collins. “All his life he was in fear of the workhouse and he never spent anything.”

Yates added: “We want to make sure the house continues as Ronnie’s life force. It can be a force for everything that he represented. We need that now more than ever.”

Elon Musk has expanded his lawsuit against the ChatGPT maker OpenAI, adding federal antitrust and other claims and adding OpenAI’s largest financial backer, Microsoft, as a defendant.

Musk’s amended lawsuit, filed on Thursday night in federal court in Oakland, California, said Microsoft and OpenAI illegally sought to monopolize the market for generative artificial intelligence and sideline competitors.

Like Musk’s original August complaint, it accused OpenAI and its chief executive, Samuel Altman, of violating contract provisions by putting profits ahead of the public good in the push to advance AI.

“Never before has a corporation gone from tax-exempt charity to a $157bn for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon – and in just eight years,” the complaint said. It seeks to void OpenAI’s license with Microsoft and force them to divest “ill-gotten” gains.

OpenAI in a statement said the latest lawsuit “is even more baseless and overreaching than the previous ones”. Microsoft declined to comment.

“Microsoft’s anticompetitive practices have escalated,” Musk’s attorney Marc Toberoff said in a statement. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

Musk has a long-simmering opposition to OpenAI, a startup he co-founded and that has since become the face of generative AI through billions of dollars in funding from Microsoft.

Musk has gained new prominence as a key force in Donald Trump’s incoming administration. Trump named Musk to a new role designed to cut government waste, after he donated millions of dollars to Trump’s Republican campaign.

The expanded lawsuit said OpenAI and Microsoft violated antitrust law by conditioning investment opportunities on agreements not to deal with the companies’ rivals. It said the companies’ exclusive licensing agreement amounted to a merger lacking regulatory approvals.

In a court filing last month, OpenAI accused Musk of pursuing the lawsuit as part of an “increasingly blusterous campaign to harass OpenAI for his own competitive advantage”.

The confirmation prospects of two of Donald Trump’s most controversial cabinet choices were in jeopardy over sexual misconduct allegations on Friday in developments mirroring the president-elect’s own history of abusive behavior towards women.

Uncertainty surrounded the nomination of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice as defense secretary – whose path to Senate confirmation was already complicated over concerns about his inexperience and extreme views – following revelations that police in California investigated a sexual assault allegation against him in 2017.

No charges were pressed. But the allegations were sufficiently serious for Trump’s newly appointed chief of staff, Susie Wiles, to reportedly speak to Hegseth after she learned of them on Wednesday evening, the day after his nomination.

According to Vanity Fair, which initially reported the story, the incoming president’s own lawyers also talked to Hegseth, a 44-year-old Fox News host and army veteran who has railed against – among other things – women serving in military combat roles.

The disclosure compounded the controversy over Matt Gaetz, the far-right Florida congressman nominated as attorney general despite having faced a two-year Department of Justice investigation over sex-trafficking allegations. They included allegations that he had sex with a 17-year-old minor.

Republican and Democratic senators pressed on Friday to see a House of Representatives ethic committee report into Gaetz’s conduct that was commissioned despite the criminal investigation ending without charges.

Gaetz forestalled Friday’s scheduled publication of the report – the contents of which were widely expected to be damaging to him – by resigning from the House immediately after Trump announced his nomination on Wednesday. The House speaker, Mike Johnson, has also said he would “strongly request” the report not be published.

But the report’s existence could still in effect torpedo his nomination after senior senators – including Republican John Cornyn of Texas, a member of the Senate judiciary committee – demanded that it be preserved for use in Senate confirmation hearings.

The inquiry was originally launched in 2021 to investigate whether the congressman “may have engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift, in violation of House rules, laws, or other standards of conduct”.

Trump is believed to have picked Gaetz as the ideal candidate to conduct a wholesale purge of the justice department, against which he harbors bitter grievances for pressing criminal investigations into his conduct during his first presidency.

Hegseth, likewise, has been selected with a view to purging the armed forces, which he has accused of being hampered by “woke leadership”.

His prospects of doing so seemed to be clouded by disclosure of the 2017 investigation, which stemmed from an alleged incident at the Hyatt Regency hotel and spa in Monterey, California, which was hosting a Republican women’s conference.

The Monterey city manager’s office confirmed the investigation in a brief statement, adding that the alleged incident occurred between midnight on 7 October 2017 and 7am the following morning.

Hegseth reportedly told Wiles and the Trump legal team that it stemmed from a consensual encounter and described the allegation as “he said, she said”, Vanity Fair reported.

The magazine’s website also quoted a source as saying Hegseth had not been vetted. This was countered by a source in Trump’s transition team, who said: “Hegseth was vetted, but this alleged incident didn’t come up.”

The dispute over vetting followed separate reports that standard FBI background checks on some of Trump’s most controversial nominees – designed to uncover past criminal activity and other potentially disqualifying liabilities – had been set aside.

The questions over the sexual behavior of his nominees echo Trump’s own past. The president-elect was ordered to pay $83m damages to the writer E Jean Carroll last year after a New York jury in a civil trial found him liable for sexual assault and defamation. Carroll alleged Trump raped her in 1996, which Trump denied.

His candidacy in the 2016 presidential election was almost derailed following the emergence of an Access Hollywood tape from more than a decade earlier in which he boasted of using his celebrity status to grab women’s genitals.

Sexual misconduct allegations have also dogged Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s selection as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. A former babysitter for his children alleged that Kennedy groped her in his home in 1998. Kennedy responded to the accusation, again reported in Vanity Fair, by saying: “I’m not a church boy.”

The host country of this year’s UN climate summit, Azerbaijan, has rolled out “red carpet” treatment to fossil fuel bosses and lobbyists, the Guardian can reveal.

At least 132 oil and gas company senior executives and staff were invited to the Cop29 summit, and had special badges denoting they were guests of the presidency.

That was equivalent to red-carpet treatment at a UN climate summit, Cop experts told the Guardian. Holders of the special host country badges include the head of Saudi oil company Aramco and the chief executive of BP.

The revelations came as some of the world’s most senior voices on the climate raised concerns over the influence of the global fossil fuel industry and petrostates at the UN talks, which reached their midway point on Friday night. Countries are gathered in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, to establish ways of raising the cash that developing countries need to cut their greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of the climate crisis.

Al Gore, a former vice-president of the US, called for new safeguards that would bar countries without strong climate action plans from hosting the annual summits, and stop the influence of fossil fuel companies.

“The UN secretary general ought to have a role in picking where these Cops are to be based,” he said. “Three years in a row it’s been a petrostate [as host of the talks]. Obviously it needs to be reformed.”

Delegates should also be barred unless they could show their companies met certain standards, he added.

He said: “The criteria ought to be: do they have a real credible net zero commitment on the country that they’re from? If not, no. Do they have a plan to phase down the production of oil and gas? Are they spending an adequate share of their windfall profits on the transition to clean energy? Will they end their anti-climate lobbying? Will they end their green washing?”

Companies failing to meet these criteria should be excluded. Gore’s calls follow a letter calling for reform of Cops – which stands for “conference of the parties” under the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), parent treaty to the Paris agreement – that was published early on Friday. Signatories included a former UN climate chief, a former UN secretary general and a former UN climate envoy.

Others have defended the UNFCCC process, though acknowledging it to be unwieldy. Mohamed Adow, director of the Power Shift Africa thinktank, pointed out that for many small developing countries it was the only forum in which they could confront the big economies that are the authors of the climate crisis.

“The Cop process may not be perfect, but it has moved the world forward significantly over the last decade,” he said. “[Any reform must be] done in a way that strengthens the process, not weakens it. This forum is the only place where vulnerable nations have a seat at the table. This is a global challenge that needs global solutions.”

Laurence Tubiana, a former French diplomat who helped craft the Paris agreement and is now chief executive of the European Climate Foundation, said on X: “Multilateralism is the foundation of the climate process. The Paris agreement happened because every country had a voice. Reforms must strengthen, not sideline, the consensus-building that builds trust.”

Azerbaijan put itself forward as potential host of this year’s summit a year ago at the Cop28 summit in the United Arab Emirates, another large producer of oil and gas, after Russia vetoed several other former eastern bloc countries from hosting. Azerbaijan’s oil and gas industry began in the mid-19th century, and the country’s economy is built on the fossil fuels, which make up more than 90% of its exports. President Ilham Aliyev, speaking at the summit earlier this week, called them “a gift of God”.

But the host country has been performing well as an “honest broker” at the talks in their first week, according to negotiators who spoke to the Guardian. This year’s talks focus heavily on the provision of climate finance to poor countries, rather than reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Progress on that has been slow.

The “transition away from fossil fuels” that countries committed to last year has also been a source of contention, as some countries initially sought to sideline the resolution at this year’s meeting.

The holders of host country badges, according to an analysis of UN data seen by the Guardian, include Amin Nasser, the boss of the Saudi oil company Aramco, and nine others from his company. Saudi Arabia has long been accused of obstructing progress at Cops.

The single biggest beneficiary of the VIP treatment was another Saudi power company, ACWA, which has coal, gas and renewable assets. Its chief executive, Marco Arcelli, was accompanied by 24 of his staff.

BP’s chief executive, Murray Auchincloss, was also granted a host country pass, along with seven others from the company. BP has a long history in Azerbaijan and remains a key player in the petrostate’s oil and gas operations. Exxonmobil’s head, Darren Woods, and three staff also received the special invitations.

Many campaigners are angry at the presence of fossil fuel bosses and lobbyists at Cops. Dawda Cham, from Help-Gambia, an environmental NGO, said: “The fossil fuel industry has long manipulated climate negotiations to protect its interests while our planet burns. It’s time to sever these ties and ensure that the voices of the global south are amplified, not silenced. We must kick big polluters out of our climate conversations and make them pay.”