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 oil industry is "hushing up" the extent to which corrosion is eating into pipelines and hitting production, according to an influential oil industry consultant who is also the head of the UK Royal Society of Chemistry.
Richard Pike, who spent 25 years working for BP before becoming a consultant, argues that some of the world’s largest oilfields have recently shut down production so that corroded pipelines could be fixed before they leaked.
Once again the threat of oil and gas development looms over British Colombia’s wild and beautiful Pacific coast. For over thirty years there have been both provincial and federal moratoria in place to protect the coast from oil and gas development. But now the BC government is intensively lobbying the federal government to lift their moratorium in order to allow drilling by Chevron and Shell, who explored in the areas in the sixties.
A Europe-wide study has provided "conclusive proof" that climate change is responsible for spring arriving earlier each year. Scientists from 17 countries have reviewed 125,000 reports involving 561 species. They have concluded that spring is beginning six to eight days earlier than 30 years ago.
Sweden’s Prime Minister, Goran Persson, has attacked an ambitious project to build a 750-mile gas pipeline beneath the Baltic Sea as a potential ecological disaster. Despite his comments the £3.4bn pipeline project –called the North European Gas Pipeline or NEPG - is going ahead.
LATEST PROGRAM RESEARCH
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.
This report finds that the EU’s demand for gas is set to decline significantly in line with climate targets, eliminating the need to expand supply from new fields or infrastructure. In the report the authors model how EU’s gas demand matches future supply in various forecasted scenarios.