STOP FUNDING FOSSILS

Our Stop Funding Fossils program uses critical analysis and strategic organizing to end the vast quantities of government support flowing to the fossil fuel industry and accelerate the clean energy transition.
Public finance and subsidies for fossil fuels play a key role in driving oil, gas, and coal production. Climate leadership means not wasting another cent of public money on the industries that are causing the problem.

OVERVIEW OF WORK

Our research shows that G20 governments spend $444 billion per year propping up oil, gas, and coal production, while the G20’s taxpayer-backed public finance institutions provide nearly 4 times more public finance to fossil fuels than to clean, renewable energy.

These massive subsidies play a key role in expanding oil and gas production and locking in existing fossil fuels: recent analysis finds that half of the new oil fields being drilled in the US would have remained undrilled if not for substantial subsidies; at the same time, public finance for fossil fuels de-risks capital-intensive megaprojects, like massive coal plants in Southeast Asia, few of which would proceed without government backing. And as oil, gas, and coal producers face increasing competition from renewable energy, instead of simply reducing fossil fuel production, they exert their political influence to get more handouts to keep extracting.

Instead of spending scarce public resources on the fossil fuel industry, our work challenges public institutions to scale up their support for distributed renewable energy solutions that can deliver energy access quickly and at least cost in many developing countries: today, support for these solutions makes up only a tiny fraction of all public finance for energy.

We know from the work of our Energy Transitions and Futures program that already-producing oilfields, gasfields, and coal mines hold enough carbon to take the world well beyond 1.5°C of warming and up to 2°C. This means that governments who’ve signed up to the Paris Agreement (that’s nearly everybody) shouldn’t spend another cent of public money on fossil fuels if they take their commitment seriously. We call on them to stop funding fossils.

LATEST PROGRAM POSTS

Yesterday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressed the importance of making energy available to the poor as a foundation for combating poverty as world leaders gathered in New York this week at the Millennium Development Goal Summit.

At a high-level event yesterday, the Secretary General said that it is lack of political will that is keeping poor communities worldwide from increased access to energy, and he called on countries to work together to create access initiatives.

Since the 1973 Arab oil embargo, successive US administrations have equated national security with access to, and control of, oil – particularly in the Persian Gulf, which holds two-thirds of global oil reserves. In other words, as long as we need oil, we need the Persian Gulf.

Faced with this unpleasant fact, every President since Carter has chosen to defend US “access” to the Persian Gulf.

Estimates of how much that particular decision has cost the US taxpayer have always been hard to come by.  About a decade ago, Greenpeace and Doug Koplow (Earthtrack) published a

Yesterday Shell waded into the Deepwater fall-out by defending deep-water drilling.

Peter Voser, Shell chief executive, argued that deep-water drilling still had an important role to play in global energy supply. “We have got growth potential there”.

But what cost is this growth?

Even the industry’s own trade magazines are questioning the business as usual scenario. One such magazine, Petroleum Economist, recently warned that the “majors' search for oil increasingly requires Olympian efforts: deeper, trickier, pricier.”


According to a report recently released by the National Institute on Money in State Politics, politicians in the Gulf of Mexico are awash in oil and gas industry contributions.
Oil and gas companies, along with their owners and employees, gave $21.1 million to the campaigns for state elected officials between 2003 and 2008 in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.
Sitting members of the Texas Railroad Commission, which issues permits for oil and gas drilling, collected $2.6 million between 2004 and 2008 from individuals and companies associated with the oil and gas industry - a total of 31 percent of their campaign

LATEST PROGRAM RESEARCH

"Today’s announcement from the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Canada and many of their peers is a disappointment. At a time when we need rich country leaders to concretely expand their past ambition to secure a fair deal, these ministers are just regurgitating promises and initiatives that are now more than a decade old and have been so ineffective that fossil fuel handouts and profits continue to reach record levels."