The International Energy Agency and the Paris Goals: QandA for Investors
Investors often use the WEO to assess energy investments. Contrary to the IEA’s claims, its ‘Sustainable Development Scenario’ (SDS) is not aligned with the Paris goals.
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.
Investors often use the WEO to assess energy investments. Contrary to the IEA’s claims, its ‘Sustainable Development Scenario’ (SDS) is not aligned with the Paris goals.
The twin challenges of air pollution and climate change demand a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, and a particularly rapid phase-out of coal-fired power plants. Despite this, the Korean government continues to be among the biggest backers of coal-fired power plants around the world.
The IEA scenarios — including the Sustainable Development Scenario (SDS) — fall short of the Paris Agreement goals and therefore don’t actually answer the question investors are asking, namely: are companies prepared for a world that takes the Paris Agreement seriously? The SDS is not providing an effective stress test, nor a useful guide to how things may change.
Ireland is on course to miss both its short-term climate commitments within EU legislation, and its long-term target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector by between 80 and 95 percent by 2050. Expanded gas extraction will only make it more difficult to achieve these goals, and must be avoided in order to achieve a safe climate future.
Given US Bank’s continued financing of oil and gas pipeline construction, and the harm those pipelines cause for communities and the climate, US Bank should extend its policy to prohibit all financing to companies building oil and gas pipelines, and all other fossil fuel infrastructure that neglects Indigenous rights and is incompatible with achieving the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.
How the IEA Guides Energy Decisions Towards Fossil Fuel Dependence and Climate Change
This briefing outlines compelling reasons for investors to question whether TransCanada should proceed with Keystone XL given various obstacles facing its construction and commercially viable operation, and suggests questions institutional financiers may wish to ask TransCanada.
To have any hope of meeting globally-agreed climate goals, global financial flows must rapidly align with low-emission, climate-resilient development, and government-backed public finance institutions like the World Bank must signal this transition.
This analysis explores the oil production, carbon emissions, and taxpayer cost implications of the proposed changes to Section 45Q in the U.S. tax code in S.1535 and H.R.3761.
Coming two years after the Paris Agreement, the initial public offering (IPO) of Saudi Aramco will be strongly shaped by climate change. Most analysts believe that Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman’s US $2 trillion estimate of Aramco’s value was unrealistic, reckoning instead on somewhere in the range $1 to 1.5 trillion. But there has been a gap in commentary, on how moves to decarbonise the energy system will affect the IPO’s valuation.