The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has already done everything it can to kill the chances of a legally binding agreement emerging from the Copenhagen climate change summit.

Now it can sit back, relax and watch the action from a coffee shop outside the United Nations conference, content that its efforts to derail U.S. climate policy have effectively hamstrung the international negotiations.

As explained clearly in “The Global Climate Change Lobby,” an excellent new report from the Center for Public Integrity, corporate lobbyists and trade associations focus their attention on tampering with domestic legislative efforts, and then stand by and watch as their positions and talking points contaminate international negotiations indirectly.

Business interests (or BINGOs as they’re called in U.N. speak) “can have very little effect at these meetings,” according to Nick Campbell, a European industry lobbyist who has represented the International Chamber of Commerce at U.N. climate talks since the early 1990s when the global effort to fight climate change began with the Rio Earth Summit.

If the Chamber or other lobbying groups send any staff to international summits like the upcoming Copenhagen conference, their goal is to “loiter” in the coffee shops and collect business cards from delegates they can target later on legislative matters back home.

Grist took a deeper look at a list of “local organizers” of the Astroturf ‘Energy Citizens’ rallies and discovered that most of them are actually oil industry lobbyists.  Go figure.  Since the American Petroleum Institute cooked up the idea for these ‘grassroots’ events to mimic the health care town hall rent-a-mobs, it makes sense that Big Oil’s lobbyists would do the ‘community organizing’ necessary to pull off this charade.

Grist found that registered oil industry lobbyists are behind 15 of the 21 planned rallies, which look more like ‘glorified company picnics’ than spontaneous grassroots gatherings of concerned citizens.