PUBLIC FINANCE
Governments are still spending billions subsidizing oil, gas and coal. We need to #StopFundingFossils and start investing in the future.
OVERVIEW OF WORK
Since the Paris Agreement, G20 governments have continued to finance more than USD 77 billion dollars annually in fossil fuels through multilateral development banks (MDBs), bilateral development finance institutions (DFIs), and export credit agencies (ECAs). This is three times the support they provide to clean energy. Beyond providing this direct monetary backing, these institutions reduce perceived risk and provide a government stamp of approval on fossil fuel projects that often serves to crowd in private finance. While recently the level of fossil fuel support has started to drop, institutional policies to exclude fossil fuel finance are needed to ensure this progress continues.
While a number of public finance institutions committed to ending coal finance in the early 2010s, it wasn’t until 2017, following years of campaign pressure by Oil Change and others, that the World Bank made a meaningful commitment to stop financing for upstream oil and gas. Following an intense campaign effort, in 2019 the European Investment Bank committed to ending nearly all oil, gas and coal finance. Recently, the UK announced it would end overseas oil and gas finance, and the EU and US, among others, have signalled that they intend to follow suit. Building off these successes, OCI is now working to secure further commitments from governments and public finance institutions on ending public finance for fossil fuels.
LATEST PROGRAM POSTS
Acknowledging the obvious fact that our future cannot be fossil fueled begins the game that will only be truly won when our public policies, our laws, our governments, and our social norms fully incorporate this truth.
In his first outing as Secretary of State, former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson may have been quiet, but the world’s climate leaders were not. Ahead of the G20 meeting of foreign ministers, hosted by Germany in Bonn, German government officials didn’t mince words: “You can’t fight climate change by putting up barbed wire,” said Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, a not-so-thinly veiled swipe at Rex Tillerson and Donald Trump’s climate denial, and the Trump Administration’s racist immigration policies.
Did Rick Perry help Energy Transfer Partners - one of the owners of the Dakota Access Pipeline - cheat Texas taxpayers out of $6 million, or was he just asleep at the switch? Either way, can we really trust him to be in charge of nuclear security as Energy Secretary?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 5, 2016
Contact:
Alex Doukas, alex [at] priceofoil [dot] org
G20 leaders fail to act on fossil fuel subsidies, undermining Paris climate goals
In response to the statements on fossil fuel subsidies in the G20 Leaders’ Communique, which fail to establish a deadline for the phase out of subsidies, Oil Change International has released the following statement from Senior Campaigner Alex Doukas:
“On China’s watch, G20 leaders have again failed to set a deadline to end fossil fuel subsidies, despite first agreeing to do so in 2009. Time is running out. Every dollar wasted on fossil fuel subsidies pushes us closer to climate disaster and
LATEST PROGRAM RESEARCH
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, worsening the climate crisis and harming communities and ecosystems.
*Updated February 2024* Oil Change International analysis shows that several major countries continue to pump $6.2 billion in public finance into international fossil fuel projects despite committing to end this support by the end of 2022.
New research shows that Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries supported fossil fuel exports by an average of USD 41 billion from 2018-2020, almost five times more than clean energy exports ($8.5 billion).