GLOBAL POLICY
The Paris climate goals demand a rapid, just transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. We’re pushing governments to lead the way by adopting policies to end oil and gas production.
OVERVIEW OF WORK
In order to achieve climate goals, governments and other decision makers must support a just and equitable move away from fossil fuels. We are pushing for precedent-setting leadership from governments to put policies in place to manage the decline of oil and gas and ensure a just transition for fossil-fuel dependent workers and communities.
Building from a growing group of first mover governments, we are pressuring for increasing numbers of national and regional governments to end new licenses and permits for oil and gas production, and to develop plans to wind down their existing production over time.
LATEST PROGRAM POSTS
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has taken a big step towards implementing one of the most contentious parts of last year's Energy Policy Act by proposing a regulatory system that will nearly double domestic ethanol use.
Called the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), the regulation establishes a credit-trading system that will mandate the use of 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol nationwide by 2012 -- up from 4 billion gallons this year.
Over 50 per cent of the expected rise in global energy demand over the next twenty five years will be met by oil and gas, according to new forecasts by the International Energy Agency. However wind and solar energy could meet a substantially greater proportion of global demand by 2030 if the right policies are put in place.
President Vladimir Putin has denied that Russia is acting like a superpower by throwing its weight around to control prices and supplies of oil and gas to countries like Ukraine. "We're not behaving like an energy superpower," he said yesterday at the Russian-organised Valdai Club. "We just want negotiations that are fair. We don't need superpower status."
Slowly but surely people are beginning to talk about a taboo- what happens when the oil runs out. What are we going to do? How are we going to live? How will we feed, power and house ourselves? How can we transition our society away from oil to a secure energy future? These kind of questions are being explored in a three month programme of events in my local town talking about how the community can cope “beyond oil”.
LATEST PROGRAM RESEARCH
This new report, “Public Enemies: Assessing MDB and G20 international finance institutions’ energy finance” looks at G20 country and MDB traceable international public finance for fossil fuels from 2020-2022 and finds they are still backing at least USD 47 billion per year in oil, gas, and coal projects.
This briefing assesses Shell’s fossil fuel extraction plans in light of Shell's appeal of a Dutch court verdict requiring the company to take responsibility for its climate pollution. Our analysis shows that Shell continues to plan for levels of oil and gas production and investment that undermine the world’s chances of curtailing climate disaster.
The countries that produce oil and gas from the North Sea (Norway, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark) rank among the countries with the greatest economic capacity and responsibility to rapidly phase out extraction, and to finance just transitions to renewable energy solutions domestically and abroad.