fossil fuel industry

Greta Thunberg Detained at Brussels Climate Protest Against Fossil Fuel Subsidies

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Original article by Edward Carver republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg is detained during a climate protests against fossil fuel subsidies in Brussels on October 5, 2024. (Photo: John Thys/AFP via Getty Images)

Renowned activist Greta Thunberg was detained on Saturday at a climate protest in Brussels aimed at ending European Union fossil fuel subsidies.

The protest included hundreds of campaigners from Extinction Rebellion and other groups; they came together under the name United for Climate Justice (UCJ). One group of them marched in an area near the European Parliament, while another group that included Thunberg blocked a section of the Boulevard du Jardin Botanique.

“Our politicians have failed us,” Paolo Destilo, a UCJ spokesperson, told Politico. “European leaders’ continued support for the fossil fuel industry raises serious questions about their commitment to effective climate action.”

Another UCJ spokesperson, Angela Huston Gold, pointed to devastating floods that recently hit Europe and Africa as a warning sign for the planet.

“Increasingly frequent and extreme natural disasters are likely to claim a billion victims by the end of the century, mainly due to the use of fossil fuels,” Huston Gold said in a statement, citing a 2023 study in Energies, a journal. “To avoid ecological and social collapse, fossil fuel subsidies must end now.”

The European Commission published a report last year showing that the EU spent 123 billion euros ($135 billion) on fossil fuel subsidies in 2022, an increase on previous years that was caused by policy decisions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (2022 was the last year included in the report.) The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development listed still higher figures for 2022.

EU’s Eighth Environment Action Program, which entered into force in May 2022, calls for a phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies, but national governments haven’t taken action, so progress is “uncertain,” according to the European Environment Agency, which is part of the EU.

Thunberg on Saturday told Politico that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who’s been in office since 2019, was not a green champion.

UCJ on Tuesday sent an open letter to von der Leyen and other EU institutional leaders calling for a phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies by 2025. “The EU should provide technical and financial assistance to member states facing challenges in meeting phaseout deadlines and offer incentives for achieving milestones ahead of schedule,” it says.

Staffers at the European Commission were in fact among the demonstrators in Brussels on Saturday, Politico reported.

“There’s a lot of tools the institutions have now to fight climate change, but since the [European Parliament elections in June] there’s been a lot of backtracking,” one commission staffer told Politico, given anonymity in order to speak freely.

“It’s now all about competitiveness and the ‘clean industrial deal,’ whatever that means,” the staffer added. “The urgency has been lost—the Parliament has shifted to the right, the commission in many ways has shifted to the right—and discussion of the climate has faded into the background.”

Thunberg, who’s now 21, came to fame as a 15-year-old activist in Sweden who helped form the global school strikes for climate movement. She’s been arrested numerous times, including at a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Denmark earlier this month.

Thunberg and other activists who sat with interlocked arms on the Boulevard du Jardin Botanique were arrested and taken to the police station, according to The Brussels Times.

Original article by Edward Carver republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingGreta Thunberg Detained at Brussels Climate Protest Against Fossil Fuel Subsidies

Carbon capture: a decarbonisation pipe dream

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Relearning lessons of the past

1 September 2022 (IEEFA): Underperforming carbon capture projects considerably outnumber successful projects globally, and by large margins, with both the technology and regulatory framework found wanting, finds a new report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

The report, The Carbon Capture Crux – Lessons Learned, studies 13 flagship large-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS)/carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS) projects in the natural gas, industrial and power sectors in terms of their history, economics and performance. These projects account for around 55% of the total current operational capacity worldwide.

Author Bruce Robertson says seven of the thirteen projects underperformed, two failed, and one was mothballed

“CCS technology has been going for 50 years and many projects have failed and continued to fail, with only a handful working.

“Many international bodies and national governments are relying on carbon capture in the fossil fuel sector to get to Net Zero, and it simply won’t work.

“Although some indication it might have a role to play in hard-to-abate sectors such as cement, fertilisers and steel, overall results indicate a financial, technical and emissions-reduction framework that continues to overstate and underperform.”

IEEFA’s study found that Shute Creek in the U.S. underperformed its carbon capture capacity by around 36% over its lifetime, Boundary Dam in Canada by about 50%, and the Gorgon project off the coast of Western Australia by about 50% over its first five-year period.

“The two most successful projects are in the gas processing sector – Sleipner and Snøhvit in Norway. This is mostly due to the country’s unique regulatory environment for oil and gas companies,” says co-author Milad Mousavian.

“Governments globally are looking for quick solutions to the current energy and ongoing climate crisis, but unwittingly latching onto CCS as a fix is problematic.”

Last week the Australian government approved two new massive offshore greenhouse gas storage areas, saying CCS “has a vital role to play to help Australia meet its net zero targets. Australia is ideally placed to become a world leader in this emerging industry”.

However, Robertson says, carbon capture technology is not new and is not a climate solution.

“As our report shows, CCS has been around for decades, mostly serving the oil industry through enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Around 80–90% of all captured carbon in the gas sector is used for EOR, which itself leads to more CO2 emissions.”

About three-quarters of the CO2 captured annually by multi-billion-dollar CCUS facilities, roughly 28 million tonnes (MT) out of 39MT total capture capacity globally, is reinjected and sequestered in oil fields to push more oil out of the ground.

The International Energy Agency says annual carbon capture capacity needs to increase to 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2030 to align with a net zero by 2050 pathway.

“In addition to being wildly unrealistic as a climate solution, based on historical trajectories, much of this captured carbon will be used for enhanced oil recovery,” says Robertson.

History shows CCS projects have major financial and technological risks. Close to 90% of proposed CCS capacity in the power sector has failed at implementation stage or was suspended early — including Petra Nova and the Kemper coal gasification power plant in the U.S. Further, most projects have failed to operate at their theoretically designed capturing rates. As a result, the 90% emission reduction target generally claimed by the industry has been unreachable in practice.

Finding suitable storage sites and keeping it there is also a major challenge—the trapped CO2 underground needs monitoring for centuries to ensure it does not come back to the atmosphere.

The report identifies interim considerations for CCS projects if no alternative solutions to emissions reduction are found.

  • Safe storage locations must be identified, and a long-term monitoring plan and compensation mechanism in case of failure developed.
  • The CCS project must not promote enhanced oil recovery.
  • To avoid project liability being handed over to taxpayers, as is currently the situation with Gorgon, large oil and gas companies mainly benefiting from CCS at their gas developments must be liable for any failure/leakage and monitoring costs of CCS projects, specifically if they get subsidies, grants and tax credits for capturing the carbon.
  • It must not be used by governments to greenlight or extend the life of any type of fossil fuel asset as a climate solution.

Robertson says more research could be done on CCS applications in industries where emissions are hard to abate such as, cement, as an interim partial solution to meeting net zero targets.

“As a solution to tackling catastrophic rising emissions in its current framework however, CCS is not a climate solution.”

The report: The Carbon Capture Crux – Lessons Learned

Continue ReadingCarbon capture: a decarbonisation pipe dream

Coming Soon

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Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London.
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)

I need to do an article about the UK government’s insane pursuit of Carbon Capture and Storage, accepting fossil fuel industry lies and continuing to subsidise the fossil fuel industry to destroy the climate.

Continue ReadingComing Soon

Friends of the Earth states UK’s support for carbon capture and storage a false solution supporting fossil fuel industries

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Carbon dioxide runs through pipes at a North Dakota CCS plant. Credit: Buchsbaum Media.
Carbon dioxide runs through pipes at a North Dakota CCS plant. Credit: Buchsbaum Media.

Responding to reports that the government will announce plans to invest £22bn over 25 years in carbon capture and storage projects on Friday, Friends of the Earth’s head of policy, Mike Childs, said: “Whilst millions of people are facing a winter of freezing in their heat-leaking homes, oil and gas executives will be celebrating. Rather than properly fund a home insulation scheme for those unable to afford it, this announcement essentially uses taxpayer money to subsidise the continued lifespan of the fossil fuel industry.

“The government needs a coherent industrial strategy to secure genuine green jobs and switch to clean energy. It must reject the false solutions peddled by the fossil fuel industry and use the forthcoming budget and spending review to spell out how it will address the UK’s under-investment in making homes affordably warm and energy efficient.”

Continue ReadingFriends of the Earth states UK’s support for carbon capture and storage a false solution supporting fossil fuel industries

Conservatives Have Taken £7.2 Million from Climate Denial Group Funders and Directors

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Original article by Andrew Kersley republished from DeSmog.

Major Tory donor Lord Michael Hintze, one of the few known funders of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Credit: Sir Michael Hintze (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Funders and directors of the UK’s leading climate science denial group have donated more than £7 million to the Conservative Party over the past two decades, DeSmog can reveal.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) was founded by Margaret Thatcher’s former Chancellor Nigel Lawson in 2009 in order to combat what it describes as “extremely damaging and harmful policies” designed to mitigate climate change. 

Its current director Benny Peiser has claimed it is “extraordinary that anyone should think there is a climate crisis” and the group suggested in a 2015 report that carbon dioxide pollution is “a benefit to the planet”. 

In reality, the world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has stated that carbon dioxide “is responsible for most of global warming” since the late 19th century, which has increased the “severity and frequency of weather and climate extremes, like heat waves, heavy rains, and drought”.

The GWPF doesn’t publish a full list of its donors, but several have been outed over the years, while its directors – which include former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott and Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson – are publicly declared.

Electoral Commission records show that these individuals have donated more than £7.4 million to right-wing political parties in just over two decades, including £7.2 million to the Conservatives, and £230,000 to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Almost half a million pounds of those donations were made in the last year.

The single biggest donor on the list was asset manager billionaire Lord Michael Hintze, who has donated over £5.2 million to the Conservative Party since 2002, including £257,400 in the last year.

Lord Hintze was revealed as one of the GWPF’s financial backers in 2012 by The Guardian, while DeSmog revealed in early September that he is one of the main donors in the ongoing Conservative leadership race, donating £10,000 each to James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, and Priti Patel.

Lord Hintze has previously said he believes “there is climate change” caused “in part due to human activity” but that he wants to ensure “all sides” are heard on climate change “to reach the right conclusion for society as a whole”.

More than 99.9 percent of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans.

Lord Hintze isn’t the only figure linked to the GWPF currently bankrolling the Conservative Party leadership contest.

One of the race’s frontrunners – Kemi Badenoch – received £10,000 from Neil Record, the chair of Net Zero Watch, which is the campaigning arm of the GWPF. In total, Record has donated over £510,000 to the Conservative Party and its MPs since 2008, and has also given money to the GWPF.  

As recently as July, Record wrote a column for The Telegraph claiming it was “debatable in detail” if fossil fuels cause dangerous levels of global warming. Net Zero Watch has called for “rapid” new North Sea oil and gas exploration, and for wind and solar power to be “wound down completely”. 

Authors working for the IPCC have said that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.

During the leadership contest, Badenoch has questioned the decision made in 2019 by Theresa May’s Conservative government to introduce the UK’s 2050 net zero target. 

When asked previously about his GWPF donations, Record said: “I personally regard the continuing contribution of the GWPF to the climate change debate as very positive in assisting balance and rationality in this contentious area.”

The Tories have also received £620,000 since 2001 from Lord Jon Moynihan, another GWPF donor. As revealed by Democracy for Sale, Conservative peer Lord Moynihan donated £25,000 to the GWPF between 2018 to 2023. The peer also has fossil fuel interests, holding shares in oil and gas majors BP, Shell, and TotalEnergies each worth more than £100,000.

Between the 2019 general election and the start of the 2024 campaign, the Conservatives received £8.4 million from fossil fuel interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers.

Prior to its defeat at the 2024 election, the Conservative Party made a series of U-turns on its own net zero policies, attacked Labour’s green spending plans, and doubled down on its support for new fossil fuel projects, approving more than 100 new North Sea oil and gas licences.

The party gathers in Birmingham this weekend for its annual conference, which will act as a post mortem for the party’s worst general election defeat in its history on 4 July. 

“There is no doubt that public mistrust of politics is fuelled by parties accepting major donations from big companies like those whose lobbying efforts make it clear they want to frustrate the urgent need to tackle the climate crisis,” Green Party deputy leader Zack Polanski told DeSmog. 

“It’s time to implement strict rules on funding political parties, including a cap on how much any individual or business can donate.

“Elections should be won by the people with the best ideas, not the parties influenced by the biggest donors.”

Reform UK

The Conservative Party has not been the only right-wing party to benefit from funding from those with ties to the GWPF.

Terence Mordaunt has been a prolific political donor to right-wing parties – giving £412,000 to the Conservatives and £230,000 to Reform since January 2023.

He was the chair of the GWPF between 2019 and 2021, sitting on its board until August this year, and told the investigative news site openDemocracy in 2019 that “no one has proved yet that CO2 is the culprit (of climate change). It may not be.”

The GWPF’s replacement for Mordaunt as chair, Jerome Booth, has also donated £50,000 to the Tories between 2007 and 2013.

Reform, which campaigns to scrap the UK’s net zero targets, has extensive ties to climate science deniers and those with financial interests in oil and gas. 

Between the 2019 general election and the start of the 2024 campaign, the party received £2.3 million from fossil fuel interests, major polluters, and those who cast doubt on the climate crisis.

On 13 September, party leader Nigel Farage headlined a fundraiser in Chicago, Illinois, for the Heartland Institute – a group that has been at the forefront of denying the scientific evidence for man-made climate change – and urged the U.S. to “drill baby drill” for more fossil fuels.

The IPCC has warned that “keeping warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels requires deep, rapid and sustained greenhouse gas emissions reductions across all sectors”, led by the energy industry. The group has also stated that “climate change impacts will put a disproportionate burden on low-income households and thus increase poverty levels.”

All of the donors named in this piece, the Reform Party, Conservative Party and the GWPF were contacted for comment, but none replied.

Original article by Andrew Kersley republished from DeSmog.

Continue ReadingConservatives Have Taken £7.2 Million from Climate Denial Group Funders and Directors