There are over 1,100 oil-producing wells in the McKittrick oil field, just north of the town of McKittrick, California. (Photo: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
“The science is clear: No new oil and gas fields, or the planet gets pushed past what it can handle,” said one analyst.
Fossil fuel-producing countries late last year pledged to “transition away from fossil fuels,” but a report on new energy projects shows that with the United States leading the way in continuing to extract oil and gas, governments’ true views on renewable energy is closer to a statement by a Saudi oil executive Amin Nasser earlier this month.
“We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas,” the CEO of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, said at an energy conference in Houston.
A new report published Wednesday by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) suggests the U.S. in particular has abandoned any plans to adhere to warnings from climate scientists and the International Energy Agency (IEA), which said in 2021 that new oil and gas infrastructure has no place on a pathway to limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C.
Despite the stark warning, last year at least 20 oil and gas fields worldwide reached “final investment decision,” the point at which companies decide to move ahead with construction and development. Those approvals paved the way for the extraction of 8 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe).
By the end of the decade, companies aim to sanction nearly four times that amount, producing 31.2 billion boe from 64 oil and gas fields.
The U.S. led the way in approving new oil and gas projects over the past two years, GEM’s analysis found.
The oil & gas industry persists in development of new fields, as top producing countries boost production.
Our latest report uncovers the regions driving the push for new fossil fuel reserves.
— Global Energy Monitor (@GlobalEnergyMon) March 28, 2024
An analysis by Carbon Brief of GEM’s findings shows that burning all the oil and gas from newly discovered fields and approved projects would emit at least 14.1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.
“This is equivalent to more than one-third of the CO2 emissions from global energy use in 2022, or all the emissions from burning oil that year,” said Carbon Brief.
GEM noted in its analysis that oil companies and the policymakers who continue to support their planet-heating activities have come up with numerous “extraction justifications” even as the IEA has been clear that new fossil fuel projects are incompatible with avoiding catastrophic planetary heating.
The report notes that U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) “supported ConocoPhillips’ Willow oil field, arguing that the Alaskan oil and gas industry has a ‘better environmental track record,’ and not approving the project ‘impoverish[es] Alaska Natives and blame[s] them for changes in the climate that they did not cause.'”
Carbon Brief reported that oil executives have claimed they are powerless to stop extracting fossil fuels since demand for oil and gas exists for people’s energy needs, with ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods telling Fortune last month that members of the public “aren’t willing to spend the money” on renewable energy sources.
A poll by Pew Research Center last year found 67% of Americans supported the development of alternative energy sources. Another recent survey by Eligo Energy showed that 65% of U.S. consumers were willing to pay more for renewable energy.
“Oil and gas producers have given all kinds of reasons for continuing to discover and develop new fields, but none of these hold water,” said Scott Zimmerman, project manager for the Global Oil and Gas Extraction Tracker at GEM. “The science is clear: No new oil and gas fields, or the planet gets pushed past what it can handle.”
Climate scientist and writer Bill McGuire summarized the viewpoint of oil and gas executives and pro-fossil fuel lawmakers: “Climate emergency? What climate emergency?”
The continued development of new oil and gas fields, he added, amounts to “pure insanity.”
A sign reading “Stop, extreme heat danger” is seen in Death Valley National Park in California. (Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)
“The clean energy transition has undergone a series of stress tests in the last five years—and it has demonstrated its resilience,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol.
Carbon emissions reached a record high in 2023, but the increased adoption of renewable energy is helping slow the pace, according to the International Energy Agency.
The IEA said in a new report that global CO2 emissions “increased by 410 million tonnes, or 1.1%, in 2023—compared with a rise of 490 million tonnes the year before—taking them to a record level of 37.4 billion tonnes.”
But the agency found that carbon emissions “rose less strongly in 2023 than the year before even as total energy demand growth accelerated… with continued expansion of solar PV, wind, nuclear power, and electric cars helping the world avoid greater use of fossil fuels.”
The report notes that “exceptional droughts” decreased the amount of hydropower that could be produced last year. Demand for coal fell to “levels not seen since the early 1900s.” It says CO2 emissions would have been three times larger had renewable energy not been utilized to generate electricity.
An IEA report from September found that rapid adoption of clean energy technologies could keep the world from surpassing the 1.5°C warming target. The Energy Information Administration forecast in December that 2024 could become the first year that wind and solar power generate more electricity than coal in the U.S.
The world will need to adopt a lot more renewable energy to address the climate crisis. Last month was most likely the warmest February on record, and records like that are being set every year. The more countries burn fossil fuels, the higher the temperatures will go.
“The clean energy transition has undergone a series of stress tests in the last five years—and it has demonstrated its resilience,” said IEA executive director Fatih Birol. “A pandemic, an energy crisis and geopolitical instability all had the potential to derail efforts to build cleaner and more secure energy systems. Instead, we’ve seen the opposite in many economies.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lee Anderson and Liz Truss at the launch of ‘Popular Conservatism’. Credit: PA Images / Alamy
The launch of Popular Conservatism saw attacks on “net zero zealots” and the Climate Change Committee.
Liz Truss’s new ‘Popular Conservatism’ faction of the Conservative Party launched today with attacks on net zero targets and environmental bodies, using the playbook established by libertarian lobby groups.
The self-styled PopCons included politicians critical of climate policies and science, including Lord Frost, who is a director of the climate science denial Global Warming Policy Foundation, as well as Conservative MP Lee Anderson and Reform party president Nigel Farage.
PopCon director Mark Littlewood is the outgoing managing director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), an influential free market think tank that has talked up its access to government.
The IEA received funding from oil company BP every year from 1967 to 2018, according to an Unearthed investigation confirmed by the IEA. Both IEA and BP have declined to say if this funding continues, when asked by DeSmog.
A branded leaflet handed out at the event, under the heading “what we stand for”, stated: “End net zero zealotry and promote energy pragmatism to provide both security of supply and low prices”.
The leaflet also named the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the government’s independent advisory body on hitting its climate targets, as one of the institutions which “stand in the way of meaningful reform”.
Littlewood’s speech criticised the UK’s net zero target, complaining about “the Climate Change Committee, pronouncing on our progress to the eye-wateringly [sic] expensive and almost certainly unachievable aim of being carbon net zero”.
Lee Anderson, former deputy chair of the Conservative Party, repeatedly attacked net zero in his speech, which he claimed “never comes up on the doorstep” aside from when it is brought up by “the odd weirdo”.
Anderson said: “if we became net zero tomorrow, this country… it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to the earth’s atmosphere”, pointing to the higher emissions produced by other countries.
Anderson argued that net zero would cost voters money, calling for an “opt-in, opt-out” approach to what he called “green levies” on energy bills, adding: “Not one politician can put their hand on their hearts and tell you how much it’s [net zero] going to cost.”
The CCC has estimated the cost of net zero at less than one percent of GDP, while the Office for Budget Responsibility has said that “the costs of failing to get climate change under control would be much larger than those of bringing emissions down to net zero”.
Liz Truss used her speech to say: “If we look at the net zero zealots that Lee has just been talking about, the need for cheaper energy is being drowned out by some very active campaigners.” She claimed voters “don’t like the net zero policies which are making energy more expensive”.
The International Monetary Fund found in September 2022 that the energy crisis was hitting UK households harder than any country in western Europe, due to the UK’s reliance on gas for heating homes.
Tufton Street Links
Politicians fronting the PopCon group have a history of working with anti-green think tanks and supporting more fossil fuel extraction.
Truss (who went to the University of Oxford with Littlewood) has extensive ties to the IEA, which is part of the Tufton Street network – a cluster of libertarian pressure groups and think tanks that oppose state-led climate action.
In 2022, Truss’s campaign for Tory leader was run by Ruth Porter, a former communications director at the IEA. Once in 10 Downing Street, Truss hired Porter as her senior special advisor, and has since appointed her to the House of Lords. A number of former Tufton Street figures were appointed to government advisory roles during Truss’s short-lived tenure in Downing Street.
The IEA publicly supported Truss’s ‘mini-budget’, which caused economic chaos by promising large tax cuts without explaining how they would be funded. While in office, Truss lifted the UK’s ban on fracking for shale gas, a policy advocated by the IEA. (The policy was ditched by her successor Rishi Sunak.)
The IEA has consistently opposed UK government climate policies, preferring “market solutions”. In October 2022, IEA executive Andy Mayer said the government should “get rid of” its net zero target, which he called a “very hard left, socialist, central-planning model”.
During her 2022 leadership campaign, Truss received £5,000 from Lord Vinson, one of the few known funders of the Tufton Street-based Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s main climate science denial group.
Rees-Mogg also has a long record of opposing climate policies. Earlier this month he said: “the current headlong rush to net zero risks impoverishing the nation to no global benefit on emissions”.
The UK government’s legally-binding target to cut carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050 is part of international efforts to keep global warming below 1.5C.
As Business and Energy Secretary in 2022, Rees-Mogg supported overturning the UK’s ban on fracking, and said “we have to stop demonising oil and gas” in a meeting with the UAE’s state investment company.
He also receives around £29,000 per month to host a show on right-wing broadcaster GB News. A DeSmog investigation last year found one in three GB News hosts spread climate science denial on air in 2022, while more than half attacked net zero policies. The channel‘s co-owner, Paul Marshall, has £1.8 billion invested in fossil fuels via his investment fund Marshall Wace.
Science Denial
Several figures with ties to climate science denial turned out for the PopCon launch. They included Lord Frost, a trustee of the GWPF who last year said global warming could be “beneficial”, along with Dame Andrea Jenkyns, who sits on the board of the GWPF’s campaign arm, Net Zero Watch.
The IEA and GWPF have both received funding from Neil Record, a Conservative donor who was IEA chairman until July 2023 and remains chair of Net Zero Watch. Record has donated thousands to Tory MP Steve Baker, an IEA ally and former GWPF trustee who has claimed much climate science is “contestable” and “propagandised”.
The PopCon launch was also attended by GB News host Nigel Farage, honorary president of right-wing party Reform UK, which campaigns to “scrap net zero”. Last year the party received £135,000 from donors who spread climate denial or had fossil fuel interests. Reform leader Richard Tice has claimed that “CO2 isn’t poison; it’s plant food”.
Farage posed for a photo at the PopCon event with Lois Perry, director of climate denial group CAR26, who is running for leader of UKIP and last month said she does not believe in human-caused climate change.
Addressing the audience Truss made a series of bizarre attacks on the Left, taking aim at “wokeism” and said the Tories had failed to “take on the left-wing extremists”.
“Wokeism seems to be on the curriculum,” said Truss. “There is confusion about basic biological facts, like what is a woman.
“Look at the net zero zealots, if you listen to the Today programme, I don’t recommend it, you’ll hear demands for more public spending.”
Truss went on to warn that the left were “on the march and actively organising”.
“These people have repurposed themselves, they don’t believe they are socialist or communists anymore. They say they’re environmentalists, they say they’re in favour of helping people across all communities, they are in favour of supporting LGBT people or groups of ethnic minorities.
“So they no longer admit that they are collectivists but that is what their ideology is about.”
She went on to claim that anti-capitalists were being “pandered to” by the Government and that Conservative values were being eroded and said it was “only through Conservative values that we can give the British people what they want”, however fell short on saying what this was exactly.
Former prime minister Liz Truss during the launch of the Popular Conservatism movement at the Emmanuel Centre in central London, in a bid to rally right-wing Tory MPs ahead of a general election this year, February 6, 2024
…
Running through a list of enemies almost longer than her catastrophic time in Downing Street, Ms Truss nevertheless claimed that Britain was “full of secret Conservatives — people who agree with us but don’t want to admit it,” while the Tory party had been appeasing “left-wing extremists.”
Painting a picture of a world on the edge of socialism, the former prime minister, best known for crashing the economy in a matter of days, asserted that “the left have been on the march.”
“They have been on the march in our institutions, they have been on the march in our corporate world, they are on the march globally,” she claimed.
Taking on this menace and “changing the system itself” will require “resilience and bravery,” Ms Truss added.
Unfortunately, rather than resilience and bravery, she had to hand only Lee Anderson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, former frontbenchers taking a break from their present gigs on GB News.
We know think tanks can shape government policy. But we often have no idea who is paying them to do so
openDemocracy’s Who Funds You? report finds think tanks raking in millions ahead of general election | Getty
You don’t have to follow UK politics too closely to have spotted the names of a handful of think tanks cropping up again and again in the news.
There is little doubt these organisations exert significant influence. Just last year, the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) was reported to have shaped then-prime minister Liz Truss’s disastrous budget.
And sometimes it seems like only hours have passed between the publication of a Policy Exchange research paper and the adoption and implementation of its content as government policy. This is perhaps unsurprising given even Policy Exchange says its “status as the UK’s most influential think tank is widely recognised”.
The influence of high-profile think tanks is also apparent in the revolving door between them and the government. The former CEO of Taxpayers’ Alliance (TA), for example, took up a job in Priti Patel’s office when she was home secretary.
So we know think tanks can shape public policy. What is often far less obvious, though, is who is paying them to do so.
openDemocracy’s annual Who Funds You? report, published today, assesses how transparent think tanks’ financial disclosures were in the past year, grading them on a scale from A to E based on how much they publish about their funders.
I should mention, at this point, that I am the CEO of Unlock Democracy, a think tank awarded an A rating (the most transparent possible) in the report.
The report has revealed that UK think tanks have raised more than £101m to influence public policy in the run-up to the next general election – £25m of which came from ‘dark money’-funded think tanks, which are opaque about funders.
Policy Exchange and the IEA were both awarded D ratings, the second lowest.
There is nothing in either think tank’s mission that indicates any requirement for high levels of secrecy surrounding their funders. So why are they so shy about revealing their backers?
Is it because the public and ministers might view any advocacy of slower action on climate change or accusations of ‘nanny-statism’ over limits on sugar, salt and fat in processed foods differently if their accounts revealed they were partly funded by oil or gas companies, large food manufacturers or private individuals with an interest in promoting deregulation or privatisation? Of course, they might not be. But that’s the point – we don’t know.
Or is it because much of the media might stop describing them, rather generously, as ‘independent’ if the truth were known about from where and whom they received financial support?
Or is it because pressure would build for Parliament to force these think tanks to register as consultant lobbyists?
Given the IEA, Policy Exchange, the Taxpayers’ Alliance and other think tanks have declined to take voluntary action to reveal their sponsors, it is time for the government to step in and require them to declare funders contributing over £5,000 a year.
The media could help by refraining from describing think tanks whose funding remains as murky as the waters in our polluted rivers as ‘independent’.
We would all then be better equipped to establish whether the exhortations of the most influential think tanks will help deliver ‘a stronger society’ or something far less attractive.
Romain Ioualalen, Global Policy Manager at Oil Change International said:
“It is positive to see this COP28 presidency and the IEA reflect the growing consensus that we need urgent action to rein in fossil fuel production and use. As COP28 negotiations start, countries must agree to end fossil fuel expansion, the only way to see fossil fuels decline significantly this decade, and for a full phase out of fossil fuels production and use. Distant promises and voluntary pledges are not enough, we need to see immediate action.
“The phase out will not happen on its own, even with growth in renewable energy. Without a strong agreement at COP28 that gets reflected in national policies, fossil fuels will not decline at the speed and scale necessary to limit temperature rise to 1.5°C.
“We deeply regret the inclusion of the fossil fuel industry’s favorite distractions, CCS and hydrogen, in this document and we urge parties to oppose any attempts to legitimize these failed technologies in a COP decision”.
David Tong, Global Industry Manager at Oil Change International said:
“Fatih Birol and the IEA reconfirmed this year that to limit global warming to 1.5ºC, there is no room for any new oil and gas expansion beyond existing fields and mines. To confront the climate crisis we need a full, fast, fair, and funded phase out of oil, gas, and coal.
“Oil Change International data show no big oil and gas company comes even close to aligning its business model with the Paris Agreement. Fossil fuel producers will not phase themselves out. The Big Oil and Gas business model cannot be reformed. Its foundation is destruction – of communities, of ecosystems, and all our futures. Cutting oil and gas companies’ operational emissions will achieve a maximum of 20% reduction in their total emissions. Governments must act to phase out the destructive fossil fuel industry and unlock the transition to nature-positive, community-owned, renewable energy.”
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)
