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.
Oil Change International research shows that only 20 countries, led overwhelmingly by the United States, are responsible for nearly 90 percent of the carbon-dioxide (CO2) pollution threatened by new oil and gas fields and fracking wells planned between 2023 and 2050. If this oil and gas expansion is allowed to proceed, it would lock in climate chaos and an unlivable future.
US non-profit Ceres has produced a paper aimed at explaining actions that oil and gas exploration and production companies (E&Ps) can take to reduce their emissions. It is also supposed to provide useful information on climate alignment to the sector’s investors and bankers. The paper suffers from a number of alarming weaknesses which threaten to reverse progress on setting standards for net-zero finance. Consequently, Reclaim Finance, Oil Change International, urgewald, CIEL, and Stand.Earth have jointly published this analysis in response.
Public Finance for Energy Database tracks all energy-related transactions from G20 bilateral development finance institutions (DFIs), G20 export credit agencies (ECAs), and the major multilateral development banks (MDBs). This includes 14,000 transactions going back as far as 2008 and totaling nearly $2 trillion.
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.
A new analysis finds that six major multilateral development banks provided over $7 billion in public financing for fossil fuels in 2015, and over $83 billion in financing for fossil fuels from 2008 to 2015, despite public claims of the urgent need for action on climate.
Each year, federal and provincial governments pay billions in hand-outs to Canada’s coal, oil and gas companies, undermining both existing and proposed climate action in Canada.
An update to our previous reports on international coal finance, this report confirms that financing for coal threatens to undermine the Paris Agreement's aims.
A handful of wealthy countries are still funding fossil fuels instead of climate action, giving 3.6 times more public money to prop up fossil fuels than they’re giving to developing countries to address climate change.
With Shell in the Arctic, the scale and volume of the blowback from the environmental community has clearly caught the Administration flat footed. When confronted, they usually first mumble something about highest standards (which is completely irrelevant to the climate argument) but if pressed, the Administration and its defenders invoke a sober, scolding tone to explain: 1) We need oil and we will need oil for a long time. While we’re all concerned about climate, we’re still going to need oil and gas in the future and we might as well make as much of it as possible right here at home. 2) U.S. oil production is essentially irrelevant for climate, because “more oil production in one place generally means less oil production elsewhere – that’s how markets and prices work”. Together, these two arguments form what we can think of as the Convenient Lie that we can be serious about fighting climate change and also approve virtually all new fossil fuel infrastructure in the U.S. It’s the Convenient Lie that keeps us from dealing with the Inconvenient Truth.
In 2009, President Obama made a commitment to reduce U.S. greenhouse gases by 17 percent by 2020. The Obama administration put this forward as the U.S. share of a global effort to limit climate change to no more than two degrees Celsius – the target scientists tell us may be safe. Achieving this target, which has been unanimously agreed on a global level, is central to the success of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan, announced in June of last year.
