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
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.