Research

This briefing, "Japan's Dirty Secret: World's top fossil fuel financier is fueling climate chaos and undermining energy security," reveals that Japan is the world’s largest public financier of fossil fuel projects, providing 10.6 billion USD per year between 2019 and 2021. Japan has been leading the drive to expand gas consumption in Asia and is the world’s leading financier of gas infrastructure globally, spending USD 6.7 billion on gas projects on average each year between 2019 and 2021.

Since May 2021, Shell has expressed interest to develop ten new oil and gas extraction assets, which could lock in additional CO2 pollution (325 million metric tonnes) two times greater than the Netherlands’ total CO2 emissions in 2021.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline will not enable U.S. LNG exporters to export more gas to Europe, is not needed in the Southeast, and will increase GHG emissions and make it harder to reach our climate targets. MVP is a false solution looking for a problem. It’s out of date and out of time.

In this six-part series, we explore the ongoing oil, gas, and petrochemical boom in the Permian Basin and Gulf Coast. It is a story of runaway toxic infrastructure, environmental injustice, and climate overshoot.

Asia is one of the few remaining growth markets for gas. The fossil fuel industry and its proponents are pushing to develop $379 billion of gas terminals, pipelines and power plants in Asia over the next decade. Roughly three-quarters of all Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) import terminals in development globally are planned for Asia. This aggressive buildout ignores a simple truth.

The assessment by Environmental Defence Canada and Oil Change International assesses eight of Canada’s top oil and gas producers, including Imperial (ExxonMobil) and Shell. It finds they are all on track to increase their oil and gas production in Canada, rather than planning a fair transition away from fossil fuels that are fuelling the climate crisis.

The Sky’s Limit Africa assesses fossil fuel industry plans to sink USD $230 billion into the development of new extraction projects in Africa in the next decade — and USD $1.4 trillion by 2050. It finds these projects are not compatible with a safe climate future and that they are at risk of becoming stranded assets that leave behind unfunded clean-up, shortfalls of government revenue, and overnight job losses.

This impending buildout of new gas infrastructure poses one of the greatest threats to meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement. Instead of forming a bridge — as gas proponents claim — gas expansion builds a wall against the clean energy future we need.

One day before world leaders meet to discuss the energy transition at the United Nations High Level Dialogue on Energy, more than 200 civil society organizations (CSOs) from over 40 countries have released a statement calling on world leaders to end international public finance for coal, oil and gas. 

There is growing recognition that central banks must act to confront the climate crisis. They have the tools to catalyze and accelerate the end of financing for fossil fuels – through monetary policy, regulatory action, and excluding fossil fuel assets from their own portfolios. But, with only limited exceptions, they are not using these tools. This report identifies 10 criteria for assessing central banks against the Paris Agreement’s objective, and applies them to assess 12 major central banks.