The PM has defended sentences handed to two Just Stop Oil activists
The United Nations had warned the long sentences could stifle protest
The protesters caused gridlock after climbing the Dartford Crossing bridge
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has defended sentences handed to two Just Stop Oil climate campaigners following criticism from the United Nations.
Morgan Trowland, 40, was jailed for three years and Marcus Decker, 34, for two years for causing a public nuisance after scaling the Dartford Crossing Bridge.
The UN had warned the government in a letter that the “severe” sentences could stifle protest.
Mr Sunak said in response in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that those who break the law should feel the full force of it.
“It’s entirely right that selfish protestors intent on causing misery to the hard-working majority face tough sentences,” he said.
“It’s what the public expects and it’s what we’ve delivered.”
One of the many occasions climate change denier and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak uses a private jet.
What an asshole Rishi Sunak is calling Just Stop Oil protesters selfish. So they’re protesting for the benefit of the planet and all it’s inhabitants human or animal, risking prison sentences and criminal records. C’mon Sunak you assole, you had better explain how exactly that is selfish?
Isn’t it people like Sunak and fossil fuel investors that destroy our planet, nature and everybody’s future for profit who are the real selfish bastards? The oil industry has known since the 60s that their actions were destroying the planet and they did it regardless for profit. Isn’t that selfish? Of course, these are the selfish bastards.
Sunak when he was Chancellor introduced huge fossil fuel subsidies that are intended to extract every last drop of oil from the North Sea despite knowing full well that that the World is likely to hit 3 degrees C warming as a result. This will lead to more and more extreme climate events as if we didn’t have enough already. It’s uncertain that humans or the planet can take 3 degrees increase due to fossil fuels and this total cnut has the audacity to call those campaigning against this selfish …
Image of InBedWithBigOil by Not Here To Be Liked + Hex Prints from Just Stop Oil’s You May Find Yourself… art auction. Featuring Rishi Sunak, Fossil Fuels and Rupert Murdoch.
Wind turbines are shown in front of a coal-fired power plant operated by energy giant RWE near Niederaussem, Germany on October 5, 2022. (Photo: Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images)
The International Energy Agency warned that while renewable energy use is surging, fossil fuel production worldwide remains “far too high” to prevent catastrophic warming.
The International Energy Agency warned Tuesday that governments aren’t moving with nearly enough urgency to phase out fossil fuels, leaving the world on a perilous track toward 2.4°C of warming above preindustrial levels by the end of the century.
While the IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook (WEO) report celebrates “the phenomenal rise of clean energy technologies such as solar, wind, electric cars, and heat pumps,” it makes clear that the continued burning of oil, gas, and coal is undermining global renewable energy progress.
“As things stand, demand for fossil fuels is set to remain far too high to keep within reach the Paris Agreement goal of limiting the rise in average global temperatures to 1.5°C,” the IEA said. “The costs of inaction could be enormous: despite the impressive clean energy growth based on today’s policy settings, global emissions would remain high enough to push up global average temperatures by around 2.4°C this century, well above the key threshold set out in the Paris Agreement.”
The IEA released its annual report just over a month before the COP28 summit in the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s top oil producers.
Kelly Trout, research director at Oil Change International, said in a statement Tuesday that the IEA’s analysis provides a “roadmap for the upcoming United Nations Climate Change COP28 negotiations: limiting warming to 1.5°C requires a clear decision on a fast, fair, and fully funded end of fossil fuels as well as a rapid deployment of renewable energy and energy efficiency, with wealthy countries in the lead and paying their fair share for a just energy transition.”
“We can’t solve the climate crisis by adding renewable energy on top of new fossil fuels—we need to rapidly replace and phase out all fossil fuels, including gas,” said Trout. “There is a massive and deadly gap between current policies, which still lead to higher oil and gas use in 2030 than today, and the rapid declines in fossil fuels required to stave off runaway climate disaster. Every investment in new oil and gas infrastructure is an investment in more methane leaks, more warming, and more of the extreme heat, floods, fires, and drought destroying communities and ecosystems.”
“We need a fast and fair plan to phase out polluting fossil fuels that are killing us.”
The energy agency said the rapid emergence and deployment of renewable energy—including wind and solar power and electric vehicles—are keeping alive hopes of preventing catastrophic warming.
“The transition to clean energy is happening worldwide and it’s unstoppable,” Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said Tuesday. “It’s not a question of ‘if,’ it’s just a matter of ‘how soon’—and the sooner the better for all of us.”
But the agency cautioned that even major increases in clean energy use won’t be enough to limit planetary warming if fossil fuel use doesn’t sharply decline. A recent NASA-led study found that keeping warming below 2°C by century’s end is “critical to limiting dangerous and cascading impacts” of climate change.
The IEA’s report notes that the world is currently set for “an unprecedented surge” in new liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects, which are heavily polluting. The agency observed that “more than half of the new projects are in the United States and Qatar.”
Kaisa Kosonen, policy coordinator at Greenpeace International, said in response to the new report that “every new fossil fuel project is in stark violation of the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C warming limit—leaders simply cannot claim to be in support of global action on climate change while supporting fossil fuel expansion.”
“We need a fast and fair plan to phase out polluting fossil fuels that are killing us,” said Kosonen. “Those who’ve polluted and profited the most must be made accountable and financially support the most vulnerable people, communities, and countries in their transition to clean, renewable energy.”
Despite CCS’s track record of failure and glaring feasibility issues, petrostates are expected to use it as cover to dismiss fossil fuel phaseout at COP28.
A new report reveals that to mitigate expected fossil fuel growth, the use of CCS and CDR technologies would have to reach gigaton scale in less than 10 years, which might not be possible. Credit: Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
With the start of the 28th annual United Nations climate summit, COP28, just two weeks away, a battle is brewing over the role of fossil fuels as nations try to stem the tide of climate change.
A “high ambition” coalition of nations such as France, Tuvalu, Ethiopia, and Ireland backed by climate scientists, climate and civil society organizations, and the UN Secretary General, are calling for commitments to phase out coal, oil, and gas. On the other hand, many oil and gas producing countries, supported by the politically potent fossil fuel lobby, are urging an approach that allows continued fossil fuel extraction – and even expansion – under the assumption that emissions mitigation technologies can largely eliminate the climate pollution of business-as-usual, emissions-intensive activities.
Now, a new report shows that fossil fuel production by 2030 is set to exceed the level that would be compatible with limiting warming to 1.5°C by more than 110 percent. A second just-released report reveals that to mitigate that growth, the use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies would have to reach gigaton scale in less than 10 years, which might not be possible.
“That idea that we can build more fossil fuels but it’s ok because we can mitigate the emissions, or we’ll be able to pull carbon out of the air or out of the smokestacks, I think is incredibly dangerous,” Collin Rees, U.S. program manager at Oil Change International, said during a November 14 media briefing sponsored by a coalition called Gas Exports Today, which was convened by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and held in advance of COP28.
In remarks delivered at the UN Climate Ambition Summit in September, COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber said that a “phase down,” not a “phase out,” of fossil fuels is what’s needed to combat climate change. He also referenced building “an energy system free of all unabated fossil fuels.” The term “unabated” has become a major reference in the climate diplomacy conversation in recent years, starting with COP26 in Glasgow where governments agreed to accelerate efforts “towards the phasedown of unabated coal power.” This language serves as a qualifier to suggest that fossil fuels can be rendered ‘clean’ through carbon capture and storage and engineered carbon dioxide removal, collectively termed “carbon management.”
While these technologies may seem promising in theory, in practice they face substantial constraints and challenges. The two new reports further underscore these limitations.
COP28 President Al Jaber speaks at the UN Climate Ambition Summit in September. Credit: Dana Drugmand.
Governments around the world are planning to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than is consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C, which is the more stringent objective of the Paris Agreement, according to the new Production Gap Report (PGR) 2023, produced by the UN Environment Program and the Stockholm Environment Institute, along with several other climate think tanks.
“There is overwhelming scientific evidence that we need to phase out all fossil fuels as rapidly as possible,” Ploy Achakulwisut, research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute and co-author of the Production Gap Report, said during the report’s virtual launch event on November 8. The report takes into account the significant risks and uncertainties around CCS and CDR, warning that the potential failure of these technologies to reach a climate-relevant scale necessitates an even more urgent phaseout of all fossil fuels. Given the feasibility concerns around scaling up carbon management technologies, the report urges governments to strive to phase out coal by 2040 and slash oil and gas production and use by three-quarters (from 2020 levels) by 2050 at a minimum.
Achakulwisut noted that even though the majority of modeled climate mitigation scenarios from the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report assume that large amounts of CCS and CDR facilities can be deployed successfully, there is little evidence to back this assumption. In fact, annual capacity from operating CCS projects resulting in dedicated storage currently amounts to less than 0.1 percent of global annual CO2 emissions, Achakulwisut said. When it comes to reducing overall global carbon emissions, she noted, CCS is not making a dent.
This is likely to be the case in 2030 too, with CCS deployment at that point expected to still not move the needle on lowering emissions. “Even if all CCS facilities planned and under development worldwide become operational,” the Production Gap report explains, “only around 0.25 [gigatons] of CO2 would be captured in 2030, less than 1% of 2022 global CO2 emissions.” The report refers to an International Energy Agency dataset which projects, as of March 2023, less than 350 million metric tons of CO2 capture capacity from all of the global CCS projects planned, under construction, and operational in 2030.
The International Energy Agency’s updated Net Zero roadmap report released in September references a slightly higher figure, saying that around 400 million metric tons of CO2 could be captured by 2030 if all planned CCS projects get built, which, the agency said, is still only 40 percent of the 1 gigaton-per-year capture capacity needed by 2030 in its net zero emissions scenario.
“There’s a huge range of evidence which is very clear that CCS and CDR will not be able to scale fast enough to make a meaningful contribution to cutting emissions this decade,” Neil Grant, climate and energy analyst at Climate Analytics, said during the report’s launch event. “And that means in this decade, the solution has to be reducing fossil fuel production and use.”
Carbon dioxide removal technologies, he added, “are very nascent.” Most existing direct air capture (DAC) operations are small-scale pilot projects. The world’s first commercial-scale DAC plant, called Orca and based in Iceland, has a capacity to capture up to 4,000 tons of CO2 per year – equivalent to the annual emissions of about 800 cars worldwide, or approximately three seconds worth of global CO2 emissions.
Is DAC Feasible?
Yet, significant government subsidies and investment are flowing into direct air capture, and plans to develop at least 130 DAC facilities are now underway. But according to a new briefing paper from the Center for International Environmental Law, even if all the planned DAC projects in the world get built and operate at full capacity, they would be capable of removing just 4.7 million metric tons of CO2 in 2030, equivalent to a mere 0.01 percent of current global energy sector emissions. Even assuming that DAC could eventually reach a massive scale, the enormous quantities of chemicals and energy inputs required to operate the machinery raises further feasibility and sustainability questions.
Essentially, the math just doesn’t add up in terms of the projected scale up of the carbon management sector in what experts say is thecritical decade to curb planet-warming emissions by at least 50 percent. Experts say CCS and CDR would have to reach gigaton scale in less than 10 years, and there is no assurance that it will get there in time.
A new report from the Global CCS Institute, a pro-CCS think tank and advocacy group, actually affirms this. Although there has been momentum in policies, financing, and proposed projects in the carbon management sector, there is still a big, glaring question as to whether scaling up to the gigaton level by 2030 is even feasible, according to the Institute’s Global Status of CCS 2023 report released last week.
“The math also indicates that this past year’s impressive step-up still has us near the bottom of the staircase, so to speak, and that CCS must reach gigatonne per annum (Gtpa) scale in order to reach our emission goals,” Global CCS Institute CEO Jarad Daniels said in a media release accompanying the report.
Only a few dozen CCS facilities are currently operational at the global level, 14 of which are in the U.S., with a total capacity to capture and store 49 million metric tons of CO2, the report states. However, the total capacity is not the same as the amount actually captured and sequestered, as CCS facilities often do not operate at their maximum potential. When considering the additional energy required to power CCS operations, and given that the vast majority of existing projects use the captured CO2 to extract more oil and gas – a process called enhanced oil recovery – the net result is generally more, not less, greenhouse gas emissions.
As far as CCS projects that are proposed or “in the pipeline” as the report calls it, that number is 392 as of July this year. But as Daniels noted in the Institute’s report launch event on November 9, most of the facilities in development would be aiming to begin operating starting in 2030, at the earliest. There are many hurdles, such as permitting and securing financing, that projects have to overcome before they start capturing any carbon molecules. The lag time between when projects are announced and when they become operational is typically around seven years or more, the report says, acknowledging that “relatively few [new CCS projects] have yet advanced to operation.”
These delays have in the past been due, at least in part, to local opposition and unsuccessful community engagement, which have resulted in some project cancellations, according to the report. “Lack of community support, coupled with permitting challenges, has become a barrier for some early development stage CCS projects in the U.S.,” the report states.
Local opposition to CCS projects have delayed their construction. Credit: Matt Hrkac/Flickr (CC BY NC ND 2.0)
Community opposition and public pushback to CCS projects, as DeSmog recently reported, appears to be growing across the U.S., and it demonstrates that “meaningful” community engagement rhetoric from CCS proponents does not often match the reality on the ground. One major proposed CCS infrastructure project in the U.S. – a 1,300-mile-long CO2 pipeline traversing five Midwestern states that was planned by a developer called Navigator CO2 Ventures – was canceled last month in the face of overwhelming grassroots opposition along with permitting challenges.
“Unmet Expectations”
The barriers and significant questions around the feasibility of CCS technologies to even scale up at any climate-relevant level are on top of an existing track record that, at best, is not very promising and at worst could be viewed as largely a failure. Analyses from DeSmog and from IEEFA, among others, show that most large-scale CCS projects underperform or fail to meet their capture targets. As the new Production Gap Report points out, “the track record for CCS has been very poor to date, with around 80% of pilot projects over the last 30 years ending in failure.”
“The U.S. has been publicly subsidizing carbon capture projects since the early 1980s,” Rees of Oil Change International said during the November 14 Gas Exports Today media briefing. “We have over 40 years of evidence that it doesn’t work.”
The IEA and IPCC both recognize that carbon capture technologies have underperformed or made slower-than-expected progress. In its updated Net Zero roadmap report for example, the IEA states that “the history of [carbon capture] has largely been one of unmet expectations.” And in its Working Group III report on climate mitigation issued last year as part of the Sixth Assessment cycle, the IPCC cautions that CCS “currently faces technological, economic, institutional, ecological-environmental, and socio-cultural barriers” and notes that global deployment rates are “far below those in modeled pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C or 2°C.”
Given this context, it is reasonable to doubt the promises made by carbon capture proponents. The numbers make it clear, as Climate Analytics’ Grant explained during the Production Gap Report launch event, that CCS and CDR technologies “are not going to be the solutions for cutting emissions in this critical decade.”
A new Global Witness analysis further substantiates this point. The organization calculated, based on petroleum production data from Rystad, that it would take the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) 340 years to capture the carbon it had produced from the company’s planned ramp up of oil and gas extraction between now and 2030. ADNOC is headed by Al Jaber, the controversial COP28 president, and new data shows the oil major’s planned output would result in the largest overshoot of the 1.5° C goal out of any fossil fuel company in the world. The Global Witness analysis also finds that even if ADNOC reaches the 10 million metric tons per year of CO2 capture by 2030, as it promises, that would result in mitigation of just two percent of the company’s projected 492 million metric tons of carbon emissions in 2030.
“If Al Jaber is serious – if we are serious – we must immediately reject the CCS false solution and tackle the existential oil and gas problem head on,” Global Witness’s Jonathan Noronha Gant said in a statement.
“CCS Is Not the Answer”
CCS critics also point to environmental, health, and safety risks that the technologies pose to communities where projects are targeted, which are often communities already overburdened by industrial pollution. Residents from these areas, such as the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast, are voicing their opposition to the buildout of carbon capture in their communities.
“CCS is not the answer,” Roishetta Ozane, founder of the Vessel Project and resident of southwest Louisiana, said at the November 14 briefing. “We don’t need any more false solutions. We need real solutions with community voices and community input.”
Ozane will be taking this message to COP28 in Dubai, where she will join other advocates on the frontlines of the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries’ expansion in calling for an end to this buildout and a phase out of fossil fuels. Competing with this call, however, is the narrative that emissions – not fossil fuels themselves – are the problem, and that it can be fixed through so-called “abatement” technologies – which provides cover for the continued production of coal, oil, and gas that is so clearly at odds with the rules of physics that govern the climate system.
During the Production Gap Report launch event, Grant emphasized that carbon capture technologies “do not replace the need for rapid and permanent reduction of fossil fuels.”
“And they therefore really can’t be used as a justification for continued expansion of fossil fuel extraction,” he added, “which is a narrative we’re seeing being pushed around the world, particularly as we come towards COP28.”
Climate scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades that this type of event will become more frequent as the world continues to warm. The major culprit behind this is the burning of fossil fuels. So it’s extremely concerning that the UK government has announced its intention to grant hundreds of licences for new North Sea oil and gas extraction.
Although burning fossil fuels to generate power and heat has enabled society to develop and flourish, we are now experiencing the unintended side effects. The carbon dioxide that has been added to the atmosphere is leading to a rise in global temperatures, causing heatwaves to become hotter and downpours more intense. The resulting large-scale disruption and suffering is becoming ever more visible.
This warming will continue, with worsening climatic consequences, until we reduce global carbon dioxide emissions to “net zero”. After that, we will still have to live and suffer in a warmer climate for generations. The collective choices we make now will matter in the future.
The small-scale, but high-profile, disruptions caused by Just Stop Oil protesters in the UK are extremely frustrating for many. But their single demand – for no licenses for new UK coal, oil and gas projects – is consistent with the science underpinning the international agreements that the UK has signed.
Temperatures are rising
Since the 1860s, the scientific community has understood that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would warm the climate. And as long ago as 1938, the burning of fossil fuels was linked to the observed rise in both carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures. Fast forward to now and global temperatures are warmer, and increasing faster, than at any point in human civilisation.
In response to the overwhelming scientific evidence, the UK and 193 other nations came together in 2015 to ratify the Paris agreement on climate change. One of the agreed goals is to limit global warming to well below 2°C, and even aim for 1.5°C, compared to the pre-industrial era.
However, the latest synthesis report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which all governments explicitly endorsed, paints a stark reality. If we burn all of the fossil fuels that we currently have access to, then global warming will exceed 1.5°C and may reach 2°C.
To avoid breaching the limits set out by the Paris agreement, some of the coal, oil and gas that we can already extract must remain unburnt. New fossil fuel extraction projects will make it even harder to stop further global warming.
Build up renewable infrastructure
There are other options. The UK government’s official advisers, the Climate Change Committee, have put forward a vision for UK power generation consistent with a net zero future. They say that the UK could provide all of its energy needs by 2050 through a combination of renewables, bioenergy, nuclear, hydrogen, storage and demand management, with some carbon capture and storage for fossil gas-based generation in the meantime.
The UK can achieve energy security without causing additional global warming. Nigel Jarvis/Shutterstock
If the UK followed the example of China and rapidly increased its investments in renewable energy, then it could achieve energy security without causing additional global warming. China emits the most carbon dioxide of any country in the world. But it is installing more renewable energy generation than the rest of the world combined.
Rapidly reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, and not issuing new licenses to extract oil and gas, is the most effective way of minimising future climate-related disruptions. The sooner those with the power to shape our future recognise this, the better.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
The right to protest is a distinctive feature of democratic, liberal societies. Yet the way in which many leading British politicians are currently talking about Just Stop Oil might make you think otherwise. Far from engaging with the issues at stake in these protests, politicians appear to be encouraging the wider public to ignore them or even oppose them.
Extinction Rebellion protest, banner reads NO MORE PLANET WRECKING FOSSIL FUELS DEMAND RENEWABLE ENERGY
Having seen their initial protests largely ignored, Just Stop Oil members have been making more disruptive (but non-violent) protests lately. They’ve been present at high-profile sports events like Wimbledon and the World Snooker Championships.
Policing minister Chris Philp dismissed the temporary delays caused to such events as “completely unacceptable”. He argued that “the vast majority of the public are appalled by this very, very small, very selfish minority” and called on those not protesting to intervene.
With the UK government announcing new licences for oil and gas drilling in the North Sea, it’s clear that collective action that allows people to demonstrate their disagreement in peaceful ways is needed. In apparent contradiction to warnings about the climate crisis, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s commitment to the green agenda is wavering.
Meanwhile, Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party, has cancelled a plan to fund the transition from fossil fuels to green industries from the first day of government, should he win power. His response to criticism on this change was to turn on protesters.
He said: “The likes of Just Stop Oil want us to simply turn off the taps in the North Sea, creating the same chaos for working people that they do on our roads. It’s contemptible.”
Keir Starmer has deployed some divisive language about climate protestors of late. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Labour leader Keir Starmer. Credit: DeSmog via UK Parliament (CC BY 3.0)
Diverting the conversation
Referring to people defending the environment as a “minority” that acts against other citizens polarises society and marginalises protesters’ claims. It depicts people’s demands as somehow niche rather than amounting to a highly pressing threat to the majority.
One of the features of language is that when we talk, we only focus on one or, at most, a few aspects of a particular object or event. A lot will inevitably remain unsaid.
Still, when what remains unsaid is one of the most obvious elements of any given topic, what is missing becomes as informative as what was said. In this case, the focus on tactics instead of the substance of the protest betrays an unwillingness to engage with the climate crisis.
The government has put forward the home secretary Suella Braverman rather than the environment secretary to respond to the Just Stop Oil protests (itself a signal that they are seen as a public order issue more than anything else).
Braverman has referred to people protesting for environmental reasons as causing “havoc and misery”. Environment secretary Thérèse Coffey, meanwhile, doesn’t appear to have made any public statements regarding the matter.
To say that people are protesting and not mentioning the reason for the protest leaves the story incomplete. That’s something that rarely happens when UK politicians talk about protests in other countries.
But when talking about protests held in the UK, the debate looms over the disruption caused, as if the core message were secondary or even dispensable. It is only when the core message is ignored that politicians can refer to those acting in defence of human and nonhuman lives as “selfish”.
In the absence of meaningful political engagement, conversations about Just Stop Oil protests in the UK have strayed mainly into tactics and disruption at expense of their core message. However, politicians in democratic nations have a responsibility towards the electorate to engage properly with what citizens demand, not just with the way they make their claims heard.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
