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
Credit where credit is due is the old motto. We may not have been going very long, but according to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Oil Change Blog is "a leading voice in the energy policy blogosphere". Hmmm, not quite a Webby, but its a start ... onwards and upwards...
Later this month, Al Gore’s new movie on climate change will be released. Called “An Inconvenient Truth”, it follows the former Presidential candidate during his “traveling global warming show”.
We have, argues the film “just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced”.
Figures released by the US Environmental Protection Agency reveal that America’s worst-polluting plant is BP’s troubled Texas City oil refinery where 15 workers died in an explosion last year. The refinery released three times as much pollution in 2004 as it did in 2003. It raises the question about whether BP has been underreporting toxic emissions.
Really interesting article in Business Week entitled “Why You Should Worry About Big Oil”. Big Oil, says the article, has big problems.
One of the main problems is finding enough oil. With soaring worldwide demand, we are consuming oil at twice the rate of discovery of new supply. “Overall production at the oil majors is struggling to keep up with demand, and the reserve replacement ratio, the measurement of how well they are replenishing their supplies, is slipping,” argues Business Week.
LATEST PROGRAM RESEARCH
Summary:
Governments have spent over $20 billion – and have approved up to $200 billion more – of public money on carbon capture and storage (CCS), providing a lifeline for the fossil fuel industry.
79% of operating carbon capture capacity globally sends captured CO2 to produce more oil (via Enhanced Oil Recovery).
Many of the largest CCS projects in the world overpromise and under-deliver, operating far below capacity.
Oil and gas companies, and some governments, are more interested in looking like they are acting on climate change than actually acting on climate change. They spend billions on smoke and mirrors, such as:
“carbon capture and storage”,
“certified gas”, and
ammonia co-firing, and hydrogen,
to make us believe that they are coming up with solutions for a livable planet when, in reality, they are trying to build escape hatches to suck every last ounce of profit out of their dirty fossil fuel business. These companies and their lobbyists are counting on adding loopholes in the final UN Climate Change Conference
Download the briefing in English or Japanese.
Despite the urgent need to phase out fossil fuels, Japan is driving the expansion of liquified gas (LNG) and other fossil-based technologies like ammonia co-firing across Asia and globally. This will worsen the climate crisis and harm communities and ecosystems. Communities and movements are rising up – particularly in the Global South – to oppose Japan’s efforts to derail the transition to renewable-based energy systems.
The Japanese government is the world’s second-largest provider of international public finance for fossil fuels and the world’s largest provider of international public finance for gas. Japan has continued financing international fossil fuel projects this year, breaking