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 last two centuries have seen the biggest rise in greenhouse gases in 800,000 years, according to a study of the oldest Antarctic ice core. Air bubbles trapped in ice for hundreds of thousands of years have revealed that humans are changing the composition of the atmosphere in a manner that has no known natural parallel.
A leading expert has warned that the world has just 10 years to develop and implement new technologies to generate clean electricity before climate change reaches the point of no return.
Peter Smith, a professor of sustainable energy at the University of Nottingham, said the UK and other countries had to embark on a strategy to reduce energy use by insulating homes better and encouraging more micro-generation schemes such as solar panels.
Anyone interested in oil politics should listen to the BBC’s great new series on oil, by Tom Mangold, called Driven By Oil. Today’s first programme was on Peak Oil.
Asked when we should have started to worry about peak oil, Matt Simmons, author of Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, replies “The best thing to have done was started 30 years ago. But we didn’t. It would have been great if we had started 5 years ago, but we didn’t. Starting today is an awful lot better than waiting for tomorrow. We need
British climate scientists have found that rainfall almost equivalent to monsoon levels has become increasingly common in Britain over the past 40 years. As the rain has increased, so too has the risk of flooding, especially in areas close to rivers which were previously considered high enough to avoid damage. Some five million people could be at risk of flooding or face increased insurance premiums.
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.