2024
The net zero approach of the Paris agreement has become detached from reality as it increasingly relies on science fiction levels of speculative technology.
Alors que les gouvernements se préparent à se réunir pour le Sommet du Futur de septembre prochain - une réunion de haut niveau des Nations Unies qui vise à "offrir un meilleur présent et à préserver l'avenir" - de récentes négociations ont supprimé deux mots du projet de résultat : les combustibles fossiles.
En tant qu'anciens chefs de gouvernement et lauréats du prix Nobel du monde entier, nous écrivons avec un sentiment commun d'urgence et de responsabilité concernant l'avenir de notre planète. Nous félicitons les Nations unies pour leur intention d'organiser un Sommet de l'avenir en septembre prochain - une réunion historique des Nations unies qui vise à garantir un avenir durable et équitable pour tous.
Coal and gas exports expected to remain roughly at current level until at least 2035 with 4.5% of emissions linked to Australia, report finds
Le plus gros parti au Parlement européen désire revoir la mesure concernant l'interdiction des moteurs thermiques dès 2035.
World’s fossil-fuel producers on track to nearly quadruple output from newly approved projects by decade’s end, report finds
At a time when we need to shift our collective climate action up a gear, the influence of the fossil fuels lobby is succeeding in slowing down ambition both at COP27 and in the EU.
2023
New path to transition away from fossil fuels marred by lack of finance and loopholes COP28 in Dubai sends an important signal on the end of fossil fuels but leaves more questions than answers on how to ensure a fair and funded transition that is based on science and equity
Oil cartel warns ‘pressure may reach a tipping point’ and that ‘politically motivated campaigns put our prosperity’ at risk
Exclusive: UAE’s Sultan Al Jaber says phase-out of coal, oil and gas would take world ‘back into caves’
Les carburants de synthèse constituent des solutions de substitution, fongibles dans le système énergétique, pour décarboner les secteurs sans alternatives. Ces e-fuels sont un complément nécessaire dans la boite à outils européenne pour atteindre les objectifs climatiques à court, moyen et long terme.
After yet another summer of increased extreme weather events caused by the burning of fossil fuels, some of the world’s richest oil and gas companies are investing in artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up their extraction of new oil and gas.
But the decline in oil, gas and coal will not be steep enough to limit global warming to 1.5C
Forecast downturn still ‘nowhere near steep enough’ to limit temperature rise to 1.5C, says watchdog
Bernie Sanders represents Vermont in the U.S. Senate.
More than a century of research shows that burning fossil fuels warms the climate – that’s exactly why granting new North Sea oil and gas licenses is a bad idea.
La réduction des émissions industrielles et des transports passe par le développement de carburants non-fossiles de synthèse: pour promouvoir les projets de production de ces électro-carburants, des acteurs de la filière ont annoncé mardi la création d'un "Bureau français des e-fuels".Ce Bureau vise à promouvoir une "filière française d'e-fuels, vertueuse, compétitive et durable" auprès des acteurs publics et privés afin d'encourager les projets et à réunir experts, universitaires, industriels et financiers sur le sujet, indiquent-ils dans un communiqué.
A new climate case was filed this week. Multnomah County, the Oregon county that includes Portland, filed suit against several oil majors for their role in exacerbating the climate change that led to the county's "heat dome" in June 2021, which killed 69 people. But the case doesn't just place
Major fossil fuel entities and trade associations including Koch Industries, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Western States Petroleum Association, as well as consulting behemoth McKinsey & Company, were slapped with the latest climate liability lawsuit today with the filing of a complaint in the Oregon Circuit Court in Multnomah County, Oregon.
Research allays fears that rapid scaling back of production would hit people’s savings and pensions hard
World Bank says subsidies costing as much as $23m a minute must be repurposed to fight climate crisis...
Hundreds of students and graduates vow not to work for ‘climate wreckers that insure those responsible for the climate crisis’
En offrant une alternative plus propre aux carburants fossiles, ces e-fuels pourraient servir la cause de la transition énergétique.
L'Union européenne a validé lundi la fin des moteurs à essence et diesel dans les voitures neuves à partir de 2035, mais les libéraux allemands ont obtenu qu'on ouvre la voie aux carburants de synthèse, auxquels croient des constructeurs comme Porsche ou Ferrari. Ces carburants sont pourtant encore très rares, énergivores et polluants.Comment sont produits les "e-fuels"? Les carburants de synthèse (ou "e-fuels") sont pour la plupart produits en combinant de l'hydrogène et du CO2.
Pie-in-the-sky fantasies of carbon capture and geoengineering are a way for decision-makers to delay taking real action
Governments are ignoring calls to stop fossil fuel expansion—despite there being little time left to avoid the worst effects of global warming.
The sharp rise in fossil fuel subsidies is just one example of why activists say climate treaties are so often meaningless.
Claimants ClientEarth say the oil company’s plan puts the company at financial risk as the world transitions to clean energy, The directors of oil major Shell are being personally sued over their climate strategy, which the claimants say is inadequate to meet climate targets and puts the company at risk as the world switches to clean energy.
The fallout when the industry fails to act is still smaller than the rewards for pumping out more pollution
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres made clear Monday that securing a livable planet depends on stopping the "bottomless greed of the fossil fuel industry and its enablers."
It beggars belief that the UN thought it a good idea to allow an authoritarian petro-state to host the already compromised summit, says Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of climate hazards
Group says forcing polluters to store carbon dioxide underground is needed to help world reach net zero
New research shows the company’s scientists were as “skillful” as independent experts in predicting how the burning of fossil fuels would warm the planet and bring about climate change.
2022
les SAF constituent l’arme de décarbonation massive de l’aviation mondiale, qui vise la neutralité carbone pour 2050. Ils pourraient à eux seuls représenter les deux tiers du chemin à parcourir. L’énergie électrique ? Pas assez performante pour espérer réduire fortement les émissions de CO2 des avions. L’hydrogène, porté par Airbus et son projet devant aboutir en 2035 ?
Shane White from www.worldenergydata.org has put together three very useful charts breaking down coal, oil and gas extraction by nation.
The sediments preserved in these cliffs in Devon were laid down in the early Triassic period, just after the greatest mass extinction in the history of multicellular life that brought the Permian period to an end 252m years ago. Around 90% of species died, and fish and four-footed animals were more or less exterminated between 30 degrees north of the equator and 40 degrees south.
Semafor launched last week with the goal of “reinventing the news story.” The news story needs reinventing, they say, because people can no longer tell the difference between unbiased fact and opinion. According to the Observer, Semafor has already raised more than $25 million, the majority of which is coming from eight corporate sponsors who want to help the news outlet address distrust in media. One of those sponsors appears to be Chevron, the second biggest climate-polluting company in the world.
The amount of heat accumulating in the ocean is accelerating and penetrating ever deeper, with widespread effects on extreme weather events and marine life, according to a new scientific review.
Fossil fuel companies that want a free pass to keep pumping oil and gas are making wildly unrealistic promises about 'capturing' their emissions at sites of pollution, or removing them from the atmosphere at later date. But the science says drastic emission cuts are needed now if we are to stay within 1.5ºC warming. Thus ‘net zero’ policies are in reality 'not zero', and effectively guarantee that we’ll overshoot 1.5ºC, triggering catastrophic climate impacts which we have no reason to believe can be reversed by speculative and unproven ‘carbon removal’ technologies.
A commercial plane photoshopped with the tail of a shark, hashtags that misleadingly evoke sustainability, tokenistic use of minorities to distract and to signal virtue: a Harvard report published Tuesday highlights rampant greenwashing by leading companies on social media.
The European Union is embarking on an experiment that will expand its climate policies to imports for the first time. It’s called a carbon border adjustment, and it aims to level the playing field for the EU’s domestic producers by taxing energy-intensive imports like steel and cement that are high in greenhouse gas emissions but aren’t already covered by climate policies in their home countries.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and almost 200 other health associations have made an unprecedented call for a global fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. A call to action published on Wednesday, urges governments to agree a legally binding plan to phase out fossil fuel exploration and production, similar to the framework convention on tobacco, which was negotiated under the WHO’s auspices in 2003. “The modern addiction to fossil fuels is not just an act of environmental vandalism. From the health perspective, it is an act of self-sabotage,” said the WHO president, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Global public subsidies for fossil fuels almost doubled to $700bn in 2021, analysis has shown, representing a “roadblock” to tackling the climate crisis. Despite the huge profits of fossil fuel companies, the subsidies soared as governments sought to shield citizens from surging energy prices as the global economy rebounded from the Covid-19 pandemic.
US and UK financial institutions have been among the leading investors in Russian “carbon bomb” fossil fuel projects, according to a new database of holdings from recent years.
Pennsylvania children living near fracking sites at birth are two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with leukemia during early childhood than those who did not live near such facilities, a new study has found.
Thirty years ago, a bold plan was cooked up to spread doubt and persuade the public that climate change was not a problem. The little-known meeting - between some of America's biggest industrial players and a PR genius - forged a devastatingly successful strategy that endured for years, and the consequences of which are all around us.
Nuclear energy is too expensive to be considered an option to help Australia reduce its carbon emissions, at least in the next decade, according to the latest report by the CSIRO.
António Guterres compares climate inaction to tobacco firms dismissing links between smoking and cancer
Strong climate action could wipe $756bn from individuals’ pension funds and other investments in rich countries
Coal plants will be reactivated if Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens a gas cutoff, a government official said. That would trigger the second of a three-stage Germany’s gas emergency plan.
Food supply expert paints grim global picture hunger 05.23.2022 By Arvin Donley NEW YORK, NEW YORK, US — Global wheat inventories currently stand at about 10 weeks of global consumption, a food supply expert said during a special meeting of the United Nations Security Council on May 19. Sara Menker, chief executive officer of Gro Intelligence, an organization that gathers and analyzes global food and agricultural data, said she disputes official government agency estimates that put global wheat inventories at 33% of annual consumption, countering inventories are closer to 20%. “It is important to note that the lowest grain inventory levels the world has ever seen are now occurring while access to fertilizers is highly constrained, and drought in wheat growing regions around the world is the most extreme it’s been in over 20 years,” Menker said. “Similar inventory concerns also apply to corn and other grains. Government estimates are not adding up.” Menker told the security council that while much of the blame
Long before the current political divide over climate change, and even before the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), an American scientist named Eunice Foote documented the underlying cause of today’s climate change crisis. The year was 1856. Foote’s brief scientific paper was the first to describe the extraordinary power of carbon dioxide gas to absorb heat – the driving force of global warming. Carbon dioxide is an odorless, tasteless, transparent gas that forms when people burn fuels, including coal, oil, gasoline and wood.
It doesn’t even work yet, but nuclear fusion has encountered a shortage of tritium, the key fuel source for the most prominent experimental reactors.
La Namibie, pays africain désertique parmi les plus touchés par le réchauffement climatique, affiche son ambition de devenir un pays industriel autosuffisant en énergie solaire et même exportateur d'ici 2030, tout en aidant l'Europe à se décarboner via la production d'hydrogène et d'ammoniac. La Namibie a "l'ambition de devenir incubateur d'une industrie du fuel de synthèse" en commençant par produire de l'énergie solaire, puis de l'hydrogène vert, et de l'ammoniac décarboné, a expliqué à l'AFP James Mnyupe, conseiller économique de la présidence de Namibie qui a présenté mercredi à Paris la stratégie du pays.
Exclusive: Nearly half existing facilities will need to close prematurely to limit heating to 1.5C, scientists say
The world’s leading energy economist has warned against investing in large new oil and gas developments, which would have little impact on the current energy crisis and soaring fuel prices but spell devastation to the planet.
When people talk about ways to slow climate change, they often mention trees, and for good reason. Forests take up a large amount of the planet-warming carbon dioxide that people put into the atmosphere when they burn fossil fuels. But will trees keep up that pace as global temperatures rise? With companies increasingly investing in forests as offsets, saying it cancels out their continuing greenhouse gas emissions, that’s a multibillion-dollar question.
Oil and gas majors are planning scores of vast projects that threaten to shatter the 1.5C climate goal. If governments do not act, these firms will continue to cash in as the world burns
Countries should move from coal to renewable energy without shifting to gas as a “transition” fuel to save money, as high gas prices and market volatility have made the fossil fuel an expensive option, analysis has found. Natural gas has long been touted as a “transition” fuel for economies dependent on coal for their power needs, as it has lower carbon dioxide emissions than coal but requires similar centralised infrastructure, and gas-fired power stations take only a couple of years to build. Earlier this year, before Russia invaded Ukraine, the European Commission angered green campaigners by including gas as a “bridge” to clean energy in its guidebook for green investment.
If not slowed, climate change over the next few centuries could lead to marine losses unlike anything Earth has seen in 252 million years, says a new study.
Russia has nearly doubled its revenues from selling fossil fuels to the EU during the two months of war in Ukraine, benefiting from soaring prices even as volumes have been reduced.
Strong measures by Europe could quickly deprive Russia of oil and gas income worth billions, experts say
That same day, oil giant ExxonMobil made an announcement of its own: a $10 billion final investment decision for an oil and gas development project in the South American nation of Guyana that the company said would allow it to add a quarter of a million barrels of oil a day to its production in 2025.
Our new research suggests that temporary nature-based carbon storage can help achieve our climate goals. However, the most tangible effect — a decrease in peak warming — would only occur if we also eliminate fossil fuel emissions.
When the lights went out at Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant on 9 March, the Russian soldiers holding Ukrainian workers at gunpoint became the least of Anatolii Nosovskyi’s worries. More urgent was the possibility of a radiation accident at the decommissioned plant. If the plant’s emergency generators ran out of fuel, the ventilators that keep explosive hydrogen gas from building up inside a spent nuclear fuel repository would quit working, says Nosovskyi, director of the Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISPNPP) in Kyiv. So would sensors and automated systems to suppress radioactive dust inside a concrete “sarcophagus” that holds the unsettled remains of Chornobyl’s Unit Four reactor, which melted down in the infamous 1986 accident.
La transition vers une industrie aérienne plus durable et respectueuse de l'environnement est indispensable à la survie du secteur, l'Europe l'a bien compris. L'Union européenne travaille depuis bientôt une année sur l'initiative "ReFuel EU Aviation". Celle-ci vise à imposer un mélange un pourcentage de carburants d'aviation durables (SAF) dans du carburant à base de kérosène. Si seulement les vols intra-européens sont concernés par la mesure, de nombreuses compagnies et des ONG demandent l'extension de la mesure à tous les transporteurs.
Russia’s growing isolation has strengthened the ‘siloviki’ who surround the president
To this day, the demand for metals has kept increasing. The energy transition necessary to meet climate objectives will add to that demand during the upcoming decades, for low-carbon energy technologies require larger metal quantities than their fossil-fuel based counterparts. This frequently raises concerns over the actual capacity of geological stocks to meet demand at scale, which we investigate in the present analysis.
Oil companies love to tell the world about the super cool technologies that have that will allow us to keep burning fossil fuels without cooking the climate. But those technologies are largely bullshit.
The Government needs to make immediate hard choices such as rationing fossil fuels, stopping forest and peat harvesting, cutting the national herd and restricting car traffic into cities if it wants to meet its own targets on emissions reductions, climate change experts have told an Oireachtas committee.
The fossil fuel production gap — the difference between global fossil fuel production projected by governments’ plans (red line) and those consistent with 1.5°C- and 2°C-warming pathways (blue and green lines), as expressed in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions released when the extracted fuels are burned — remains large.
2021
Les tests effectués "montrent qu'une voiture roulant à l'e-fuel émet des niveaux de NOx toxiques aussi élevés que le carburant conventionnel E10, mais aussi beaucoup plus de monoxyde de carbone et d'ammoniac", explique Transport & Environment.
If someone has planted a time bomb in your home, you are entitled to dismantle it. The same applies to our planet
After two weeks of talks in Glasgow, diplomats from almost 200 countries have agreed to ramp up their carbon-cutting commitments, phase out some fossil fuels and increase aid to poor countries on the front lines of climate change.
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Humanity injects an almost incomprehensible 42 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere every year. The majority of this comes from burning fossil fuels, but a substantial portion, about 16%, arises from how we use the land. Most of these land-use emissions are caused by deforestation, particularly in the tropics.
How Big Polluters are using “net zero” to block meaningful action at COP26
Fresh emissions targets from Saudi Arabia and Australia – two of the world’s largest fossil-fuel producers – are due to arrive just in time for global climate talks in Glasgow. These would commit the two countries to reducing domestic emissions to net zero by around mid-century – though both are expected to continue exporting fossil fuels for decades to come.
ome problems are so big, you can't really see them. Climate change is the perfect example. The basics are simple: the climate is heating up due to fossil fuel use. But the nitty gritty is so vast and complicated that our understanding of it is always evolving. Evolving so rapidly, in fact, that it's basically impossible for humans to keep up.
The fossil fuel industry benefits from subsidies of $11m every minute, according to analysis by the International Monetary Fund.