Planned fossil fuel expansion in the U.S. accounts for more than a third of new oil and gas extraction projects set to begin through 2050, according to Oil Change International.
Canadian wildfire 2023
A new report released Tuesday identifies the United States as “planet-wrecker-in-chief,” pointing to the nation’s plans for a massive expansion of oil and gas production over the next two and a half decades even as it postures as a climate leader on the world stage.
According to Oil Change International’s (OCI) research, planned oil and gas expansion in the U.S.—the largest historical contributor to planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions—accounts for more than a third of prospective global oil and gas expansion through 2050. Much of the U.S. expansion is tied to fracking, the report observes.
The U.S. is one of just 20 countries that are projected to be responsible for nearly 90% of the carbon dioxide pollution from new oil and gas extraction projects between 2023 and 2050.
If those 20 countries follow through with their fossil fuel expansion plans, OCI noted, the projects will emit an estimated 173 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of the lifetime emissions of more than 1,000 new coal plants.
“If that amount of CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere, then we’re in serious trouble,” Romain Ioualalen, global policy lead for OCI and a co-author of the new report, said during a press conference on Tuesday.
Such emissions, Ioualalen warned, would blow through the world’s dwindling carbon budget and make it “mathematically impossible” to limit global warming to 1.5°FC by the end of the century.
“The planet-wreckers report presents unmistakable evidence of the peril of fossil fuel expansion while reckoning with the world’s historic polluters, namely the United States.”
Five rich countries—the U.S., Canada, Australia, Norway, and the United Kingdom—account for more than half of all planned oil and gas expansion globally, even though they are far less reliant on fossil fuel revenues than other nations and have the resources for a renewable energy transition, OCI said.
The new report takes the Biden administration to task for “pledging climate leadership” while simultaneously facilitating “the continued expansion of fossil fuel production in the United States.”
“In 2023 alone, the administration greenlit the Alaska Willow Project; approved multiple LNG export facilities in Alaska and along the Gulf Coast, held a massive oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico, fast-tracked the Mountain Valley Pipeline, and oversaw the weakening of bedrock environmental laws, making it easier for fossil fuel infrastructure to move forward,” the report notes.
The new research was released just over a week before United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres’ Climate Ambition Summit, which will be preceded by more than 400 mobilizations worldwide aimed at pressuring world leaders to urgently phase out fossil fuels.
“The planet-wreckers report presents unmistakable evidence of the peril of fossil fuel expansion while reckoning with the world’s historic polluters, namely the United States, and how we must hold them accountable,” Helen Mancini, a 16-year-old Fridays for Future activist from New York City, said in a statement Tuesday.
“The activism youth are doing is not radical,” Mancini added, “it’s a demand for survival that the planet-wreckers must heed.”
The new global report states that burning fossil fuels is “the main driver of increasing atmospheric CO2.”
Amid a summer of extreme heat across the Northern Hemisphere, an international report led by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration revealed Wednesday that greenhouse gas concentrations, global sea level, and ocean heat content hit record highs last year.
“This report is a truly international effort to more fully understand climate conditions around the globe and our capacity to observe them,” NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Director Derek Arndt said of State of the Climate in 2022, which features contributions from more than 570 scientists in over 60 countries.
“It is like an annual physical of the Earth system, and it serves present and future generations by documenting and sharing data that indicate increasingly extreme and changing conditions in our warming world,” Arndt added of the 33rd annual report, published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
As humanity continued to extract and burn fossil fuels and engage in polluting agricultural practices, all three of the main atmospheric greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—reached record concentrations last year. The CO2 average was 417.1 parts per million, topping not only modern observational records but also paleoclimatic records that go back as far as 800,000 years.
— Chief Meteorologist Gary Stephenson (@GStephenson_Wx) September 6, 2023
“People are causing the largest known change in global climate since our transition to agriculture thousands of years ago,” said Paul Higgins, associate executive director of the American Meteorological Society.
In the ocean—which has absorbed most warming from greenhouse gases in recent decades—heat content rose to record highs last year. The annual surface temperature was 0.45-0.54°F above the 1991-2020 average, making 2022 among the six warmest years since record-keeping began in the 1800s and the hottest La Niña year on record. The global mean sea level set a record for the 11th straight year, rising about 4 inches above the 1993 average, when satellite measurements began.
While approximately 58% of the ocean surface endured at least one marine heatwave, temperatures also soared on land. As the report details:
Europe as a whole observed its second-warmest year on record, with 16 individual countries observing record warmth at the national scale. Records were shattered across the continent during the summer months as heatwaves plagued the region. On July 18, 104 stations in France broke their all-time records. One day later, England recorded a temperature of 40°C [104°F] for the first time ever. China experienced its second-warmest year and warmest summer on record. In the Southern Hemisphere, the average temperature across New Zealand reached a record high for the second year in a row. While Australia’s annual temperature was slightly below the 1991-2020 average, Onslow Airport in Western Australia reached 50.7°C [123°F] on January 13, equaling Australia’s highest temperature on record.
[…]
The effects of rising temperatures and extreme heat were apparent across the Northern Hemisphere, where snow-cover extent by June 2022 was the third smallest in the 56-year record, and the seasonal duration of lake ice cover was the fourth shortest since 1980. More frequent and intense heatwaves contributed to the second-greatest average mass balance loss for Alpine glaciers around the world since thestart of the record in 1970. Glaciers in the Swiss Alps lost a record 6% of their volume. In South America, the combination of drought and heat left many central Andean glaciers snowfree by mid-summer in early 2022.
Nearly a third of global land faced moderate or worse drought in 2022, from a 63% footprint in the contiguous United States to the continuation of a 13-year megadrought in central Chile. The report notes that an ongoing drought in Africa has “led to crop failure, millions of livestock deaths, water scarcity, and inflated prices for staple food items.”
Meanwhile, in South Asia, “Pakistan received around three times its normal volume of monsoon precipitation in August, with some regions receiving up to eight times their expected monthly totals,” the report highlights. “Resulting floods affected over 30 million people, caused over 1,700 fatalities, led to major crop and property losses, and was recorded as one of the world’s costliest natural disasters of all time.”
The @ametsoc State of the Climate Report for 2022 is now available: https://t.co/rPet2C5d61. I am happy to have played a small role in this year's issue again – see our section in 'The Arctic' chapter: https://t.co/n6POIdzvf9
Global conditions last year and Big Oil’s record profits fueled demands for bold action to overhaul agricultural practices and stop burning fossil fuels—which, as the report points out, is “the main driver of increasing atmospheric CO2.” Such calls have continued in recent months, as oil and gas giants kept rewarding shareholders with hefty stock buybacks and dividends during what has been another historically hot summer, according to data released Tuesday.
“Our planet has just endured a season of simmering—the hottest summer on record,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said Wednesday, less than three months away from the U.N. COP28 summit. “Leaders must turn up the heat now for climate solutions.”
The warning is clear and dire — and the source unexpected. “This report unquestionably will fan emotions, raise fears, and bring demand for action,” the president of the American Petroleum Institute (API) told an oil industry conference, as he described research into climate change caused by fossil fuels.
“The substance of the report is that there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequence of pollution, but time is running out.”
The speaker wasn’t Mike Sommers, who was named to helm API this past May. Nor was it Jack Gerard, who served as API’s president for roughly a decade starting in 2008.
The API president speaking those words was named Frank Ikard — and the year was 1965, over a half-century ago.
It was the same year that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Muhammad Ali felled Sonny Liston in the first round, and Malcom X was fatally shot in New York. The first American ground combat troops arrived in Vietnam and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the law establishing Medicaid and Medicare.
It would be another four years before American astronaut Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon — and another decade before the phrase “global warming” would appear for the first time in a peer-reviewed study.
“One of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts,” Ikard presciently added, according to excerpts from his speech published in Nature.
Exerpt of API President Frank Ikard’s 1965 speech on climate change and fossil fuels.
API Funded Early Research Linking CO2 and Fossil Fuels
That prediction was based in part on information that was known to the oil industry trade group for over a decade — including research that was directly funded by the API, according to Nature.
In 1954, a California Institute of Technology geochemist sent the API a research proposal in which they reported that fossil fuels had already caused carbon dioxide (CO2) levels to rise roughly five percent since 1854 — a finding that Nature notes has since proved to be accurate.
API accepted the proposal and funded that Caltech research, giving the program the name Project 53. Project 53 collected thousands of CO2 measurements — but the results were never published.
Meanwhile, other researchers were reaching similar conclusions. Nuclear physicist Edward Teller became known in 1951 as the “father of the hydrogen bomb” for designing a thermonuclear bomb that was even more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Teller warned the oil and gas industry in 1959 about global warming and sea level rise in a talk titled “Energy Patterns of the Future.”
“Carbon dioxide has a strange property,” Teller said in excerpts published earlier this year by The Guardian. “It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.”
A researcher at Humble Oil Co. (now known as ExxonMobil) checked results from a study of carbon isotopes in tree rings against the unpublished Caltech results, and found that the two separate methods essentially agreed.
This figure shows the history of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations as directly measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii since 1958. This curve is known as the Keeling curve, and is an essential piece of evidence of the man-made increases in greenhouse gases that are believed to be the cause of global warming. Credit: Delorme, data from Dr. Pieter Tans, NOAA, and Dr. Ralph Keeling, Scripps, CC BY–SA 4.0
And in 1960, Charles Keeling first published the measurements that became the famous “Keeling curve” — establishing one of the bedrock findings connecting climate change to fossil fuels. The CO2 measurements taken by Keeling back in the late 1950s showed levels of roughly 315 parts per million (ppm) at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii and rising.
Those CO2 levels have since climbed upwards to 410.13 (ppm) on the day that the Nature letter was published — CO2 levels that scientists knew both then and now would be dangerously high, as carbon levels in the Earth’s atmosphere have not been over 410 ppm in millions of years.
What the Oil Industry Knew, Then and Now
In his 1965 talk, the API’s Ikard described the role of oil and gasoline specifically in causing climate change. “The report further states, and I quote: ‘… the pollution from internal combustion engines is so serious, and is growing so fast,’” he told the API conference, “‘that an alternative nonpolluting means of powering automobiles, buses, and trucks is likely to become a national necessity.’”
Three decades later, the API urged a different approach to climate science. “It’s not known for sure whether (a) climate change actually is occurring, or (b) if it is, whether humans really have any influence on it,” the API wrote in a 1998 draft memo titled “Global Climate Science Communications Plan,” which was subsequently leaked.
As of publication time, an API spokesperson had not replied to questions sent by DeSmog.
It’s worth noting that since 1965, the science connecting climate change to fossil fuels has grown stronger and more robust. A scientific consensus around the hazards of climate change and the role that fossil fuels play in causing it has formed.
“Rigorous analysis of all data and lines of evidence shows that most of the observed global warming over the past 50 years or so cannot be explained by natural causes and instead requires a significant role for the influence of human activities,” the Royal Society explains.
Today, the API continues to call for further research on climate change — and expanding the use of fossil fuels in the meantime.
“It is clear that climate change is a serious issue that requires research for solutions and effective policies that allow us to meet our energy needs while protecting the environment: that’s why oil and gas companies are working to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions,” the API’s webpage on climate change states.
Carrying blood-red ribbons to represent the crucial red lines already crossed by Cop26 negotiations, hundreds of representatives of global civil society walked out of the convention centre in Glasgow on the final morning of the summit in protest.
The audience at the People’s Plenary in the conference blue zone heard speakers condemn the legitimacy and ambition of the 12-day summit before walking out to join protesters gathered on the streets beyond the security fencing.
“Cop26 is a performance,” the Indigenous activist Ta’Kaiya Blaney of the Tla A’min Nation told the meeting before the walkout. “It is an illusion constructed to save the capitalist economy rooted in resource extraction and colonialism. I didn’t come here to fix the agenda – I came here to disrupt it.”
A recent analysis of the lifestyles of 20 billionaires found that each produced an average of over 8,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide: 3,500 times their fair share in a world committed to no more than 1.5C of heating. The major causes are their jets and yachts. A superyacht alone, kept on permanent standby, as some billionaires’ boats are, generates around 7,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.
…
I’ve come to believe that the most important of all environmental measures are wealth taxes. Preventing systemic environmental collapse means driving extreme wealth to extinction. It is not humanity as a whole that the planet cannot afford. It’s the ultra-rich.
The fossil fuel industry benefits from subsidies of $11m every minute, according to analysis by the International Monetary Fund.
The IMF found the production and burning of coal, oil and gas was subsidised by $5.9tn in 2020, with not a single country pricing all its fuels sufficiently to reflect their full supply and environmental costs. Experts said the subsidies were “adding fuel to the fire” of the climate crisis, at a time when rapid reductions in carbon emissions were urgently needed.
