Veille 2.1

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Shane White from www.worldenergydata.org has put together three very useful charts breaking down coal, oil and gas extraction by nation. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Exclusive: Nearly half existing facilities will need to close prematurely to limit heating to 1.5C, scientists say

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The fossil fuel industry benefits from subsidies of $11m every minute, according to analysis by the International Monetary Fund.

The research found 90% of coal and 60% of oil and gas reserves could not be extracted if there was to be even a 50% chance of keeping global heating below 1.5C, the temperature beyond which the worst climate impacts hit.

As the world battles historic droughts, landscape-altering wildfires and deadly floods, a landmark report from global scientists says the window is rapidly closing to cut our reliance on fossil fuels and avoid catastrophic changes that would transform life as we know it. The state-of-the-science report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the world has rapidly warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, and is now careening toward 1.5 degrees — a critical threshold that world leaders agreed warming should remain below to avoid worsening impacts.

It seems abundantly clear that something any man, woman or child with a reasonable understanding of the scientific method will agree on is that we need to stop burning fossil fuels if we are to avoid the breakdown of ecosystems and runaway global warming.

The effects of ‘weird weather’ were already being felt in the 1960s, but scientists linking fossil fuels with climate change were dismissed as prophets of doom

After a century of wielding extraordinary economic and political power, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for driving the greatest existential threat of our lifetimes. An unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aim to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way.

Maine just became the first state to require the divestment of its state pension system from the fossil fuel industry by 2026. Though several other states and cities have taken measures towards divestment in recent years, Maine is the first state to require divestment by law.

A new report, published on 14 March, 2021 in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ journal Ambio, points out that humanity is hurtling towards destruction unless we have the collective wisdom to change course quickly.

This report analyzes fossil fuel financing from the world’s 60 largest commercial and investment banks — aggregating their leading roles in lending and underwriting of debt and equity issuances — and finds that these banks poured a total of $3.8 trillion into fossil fuels from 2016–2020.

Failing, heavily subsidized private oil companies enjoy the profits of oil extraction while the rest of us pay in tax dollars, human rights abuses, and an unlivable climate. Oil and gas companies are a political structure: they possess private, authoritarian dominion over the pace and volume of oil and gas production, and thus of important determinants of global emissions. These emissions and their consequences do not respect any sort of public/private distinction, nor borders, nor the rights to clean air or clean water.

The nations that make up the G7 have pumped billions of dollars more into fossil fuels than they have into clean energy since the COVID-19 pandemic, despite their promises of a green recovery. A new analysis reveals that the countries attending committed $189 billion to support oil, coal, and gas between January 2020 and March 2021. In comparison, the same countries spent $147 billion on clean forms of energy. The support for fossil fuels from seven of the world’s richest nations included measures to remove or downgrade environmental regulations as well as direct funding of oil, gas and coal.

The world’s coal producers are currently planning as many as 432 new mine projects with 2.28 billion tonnes of annual output capacity, research published on Thursday showed, putting targets for slowing global climate change at risk. China, Australia, India and Russia account for more than three quarters of the new projects,

Governments must close gap between net zero rhetoric and reality, says International Energy Agency head

Fossil fuels, cattle and rotting waste produce greenhouse gas responsible for 30% of global heating

Lucrative pay and share options have created an incentive for oil company executives to resist climate action, according to a study that casts doubt on recent net-zero commitments by BP and Shell. Compensation packages for CEOs, often in excess of $10m (£7.2m), are linked to continued extraction of fossil fuels, exploration of new fields and the promotion of strong market demand through advertising, lobbying and government subsidies, the report says.

Three out of every four board members at seven major US banks (77%) have current or past ties to climate-conflicted companies or organizations – from oil and gas corporations to trade groups that lobby against reducing climate pollution, according to a first-of-its-kind review by climate influence analysts for DeSmog. and they continue to invest deeply in fossil fuel projects.

Just 20 companies are responsible for 35% of carbon emissions yet they continue to ignore calls for change

The world’s five largest publicly traded oil companies are increasing their investments in oil and gas, putting a combined $110 billion in new fossil-fuel production. Meanwhile, those firms are projected to spend just $3.6 billion on low-carbon investments, such as biofuels and renewables, according to a new analysis that Influence Map