Oil Change International publishes upwards of 20 reports and briefings every year focused on supporting the movement for a just phase-out of fossil fuels.
Our new report “Past Last Call: G20 public finance institutions are still bankrolling fossil fuels” looks at G20 country and MDB public finance for fossil fuels from 2018-2020 for the first time and finds they are still backing at least USD 63 billion per year in oil, gas, and coal projects.
In this new report we consider recovery commitments and pre-pandemic policies to rank G20 countries' progress in phasing out support to fossil fuels. We find at least USD 584 billion per year between 2017 and 2019 in public support for fossil fuels from G20 governments.
Communities in Africa have generally contributed the least to climate change, been undermined the most by international trade and finance policies, and have a right to better international support for distributed renewable energy. In order to reach universal energy access before the 2030 target set by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, international public finance institutions have an urgent responsibility to provide more funding and better financial transparency and tracking for distributed renewable energy. Additionally, they have a responsibility to foster local participation in and ownership of distributed renewable energy initiatives. This briefing provides recommendations for how international public finance institutions can fulfill this responsibility, while revealing that from 2016 to 2018, fossil fuels received more than 3.5 times the support than all kinds of renewable energy did during this period.
This report reveals G20 countries have provided at least $77 billion a year in public finance to oil, gas and coal projects since the Paris Agreement through their international public finance institutions. This government-backed support to fossil fuels from export credit agencies, development finance institutions, and multilateral development banks is more than three times what they are providing to clean energy
This report from Oil Change International and Friends of the Earth U.S. shows that since the Paris Agreement was made, G20 countries have used their export credit agencies to provide nearly 12 times more finance to fossil fuels than to clean energy.
This report reveals the disconnect between Canada’s promises on climate change and the actions of its official export credit agency, Export Development Canada (EDC), in propping up the oil and gas industry.
Each year, G20 countries provide nearly four times more public finance to fossil fuels than to clean energy. In total, public fossil fuel financing from G20 countries averaged some $71.8 billion per year, for a total of $215.3 billion in sweetheart deals for oil, gas, and coal over the 2013-2015 timeframe covered by the report. Fifty percent of all G20 public finance for energy supported oil and gas production alone.
OECD countries support coal-fired power plants abroad by providing preferential financing through institutions called Export Credit Agencies (ECAs). These coal-fired power plants have significant costs, in the form damages to the health of local populations from air pollution, and the cost of climate-change causing emissions. This report finds that support for coal-fired power plants from the ECAs of OECD countries is implicated in tens of billions of dollars in local health impacts and climate change pollution each year.
