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Canada Fossil Fuel Subsidies Hit $30 Billion Amid Pipeline Push, Study Reveals

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Original article by Taylor Noakes republished from DeSmog.

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Federal subsidies to the oil and gas sector totalled $74.6 billion over five years, Environmental Defence found. Credit: David Niddrie / Flickr (CC BY NC 2.0)

Amid trade war talk of expanding Canadian energy infrastructure, a new report reveals that direct Canadian subsidies to the fossil fuel and petrochemical sectors reached nearly $30 billion in 2024.

For comparison’s sake, Canada spent between $38 billion and $39 billion on defense in 2024. 
 
 “Oil and gas companies – emboldened by their influence over President Trump – are exploiting the current economic uncertainty to call on governments to double down on fossil fuels,” Julia Levin, associate director of national climate with nonprofit group Environmental Defence, which put out the report, said in a statement.

Levin notes that oil and gas companies have been vocal in their demand that politicians work to expand pipelines and related projects, and seek new export markets for Canadian fossil fuels. Meanwhile, Canadian taxpayers, who fund the companies’ subsidies, face the expensive consequences of climate change and related disasters.

In recent weeks, the chief executives of Canada’s major oil and gas companies — including Suncor, Cenovus, Enbridge, and Imperial — signed an open letter to the leaders of four of Canada’s major political parties. In it, they demand federal party leaders to eliminate regulations, emissions caps, tanker bans on the West Coast, and carbon levees on major emitters.

The open letter was endorsed by prominent Canadian conservatives, including Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith recently repeated many of the same industry talking points in defending her taxpayer-funded trip to attend a controversial PragerU fundraiser where she shared a stage with far-right influencer Ben Shapiro.  
 
 Last month, Liberal leader Mark Carney indicated his interest in building new east-west pipelines, ostensibly to reduce dependence on foreign imports and develop new trade opportunities. 

“This push ignores the fact that fossil fuels come at a high price — not just at the pump, but through rising costs of groceries, worsening health outcomes, damage to property and huge government handouts,” said Levin in the statement. 

“It also ignores the rapid energy transition towards renewable energy that is happening globally.”

Among Environmental Defence’s principal findings is that the Canadian government spent $29.6 billion on the fossil fuel sector in 2024, which is nearly $6 billion more than what it would cost to build interprovincial grid connection infrastructure. Recent research from the International Institute for Sustainable Development suggests that a national electrical grid could lower electricity costs nationwide, create hundreds of thousands of new clean tech jobs, stabilize electricity costs, improve Canadians’ health, and provide Canada with the energy security currently threatened by the Trump trade war.

The Trans Mountain project has received $21 billion in government financing. Credit: Sally T. Buck / Flickr (CC BC NC ND 2.0)

Canada’s direct subsidies includes approximately $21 billion in financing for the Trans Mountain Pipeline, $7.5 billion from Export Development Canada (which included money for LNG and carbon capture, and financing for Canadian companies and companies and governments seeking to buy Canadian products), and another $700 million for LNG infrastructure.
 
Big Oil regularly promotes LNG and carbon capture as potential solutions for the climate crisis, though these arguments have been thoroughly debunked. LNG advocates in Canada often characterize it as a “bridge fuel” that could be used to help developing nations transition away from coal. Recent research indicates that the world’s two largest coal users — India and China — are in fact transitioning directly to renewable energy systems like solar and wind.

Moreover, LNG is a deadly fossil fuel that also happens to be resource intensive to produce, and often results in large volumes of methane emissions. Methane is estimated to be 80 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. As for carbon capture, recent research from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis poured cold water on Canada’s premier industry-driven carbon capture project — Pathways Alliance — determining that it is not financially viable and is unlikely to provide any environmental benefit. This determination is consistent with expert analyses of other carbon capture projects, both in Canada and globally.

Canada Has Given Away $74.6 Billion in Subsidies 

Environmental Defence estimates Canada spent $2.4 billion on carbon capture projects in 2024, more than in previous years.

The group’s report also determined that federal subsidies to the oil and gas sector over the last five years amounted to $74.6 billion. Their analysis of what constitutes federal fossil fuel funding includes direct grants, tax breaks, loans, and loan guarantees from the government of Canada and some federal agencies (such as Export Development Canada).

Despite oil industry claims that fossil fuel companies are investing in climate solutions (claims that have led the federal government to introduce anti-greenwashing legislation), Environmental Defence found that none of Canada’s four largest industry companies reported investments in climate initiatives or emissions reductions as part of their capital spending.

The report has also reveals that pollution created by oil and gas companies reached an estimated $53 billion in 2024. This includes increased health costs, property damage from extreme weather events, as well as decreased agricultural productivity, a consequence of changing weather patterns.

“The calls for a new oil pipeline pose real risks to Canadian taxpayers,” said Levin in an email to DeSmog, noting not only that global demand for oil is set to peak in the next four years and then significantly decline, but that oil demand is already showing signs of plateauing in major energy markets like China.

“No company is willing to bet its own money on what is guaranteed to quickly become a massive stranded asset,” said Levin. “Instead, oil and gas companies want taxpayers to pay the price for new fossil fuel infrastructure as their wealthy shareholders reap the rewards.”

Levin is particularly critical of the under reported fact that federal subsidies to the fossil fuel sector have deepened Canada’s economic vulnerability.

“The Canadian public is already on the hook for the new Trans Mountain Pipeline — to the tune of somewhere around $30 to $40 billion and rising. And the project has done nothing to reduce our dependence on the United States, with nearly half its oil still flowing south of the border,” she said.

Original article by Taylor Noakes republished from DeSmog.

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Continue ReadingCanada Fossil Fuel Subsidies Hit $30 Billion Amid Pipeline Push, Study Reveals

‘Fossil Fuels Are Killing Us’: Scientists Publish Sweeping Review of Industry Harms

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

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contractors in protective gear remove hazardous materials from a home destroyed in the Eaton Fire on March 26, 2025 in Altadena, California. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

“We’ve got to work fast to end fossil fuel operations near our homes, schools, and hospitals and trade fossil fuel infrastructure for healthy, clean energy,” said one co-author.

“The evidence is clear that fossil fuels—and the fossil fuel industry and its enablers—are driving a multitude of interlinked crises that jeopardize the breadth and stability of life on Earth.”

That’s the first line of the abstract for an article published Monday by top scientists who reviewed “the vast scientific evidence showing that fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry are the root cause of the climate crisis, harm public health, worsen environmental injustice, accelerate biodiversity extinction, and fuel the petrochemical pollution crisis.”

The new paper in the peer-reviewed journal Oxford Open Climate Change highlights the diverse impacts of “every stage of the fossil fuel life cycle” and stresses that the “industry has obscured and concealed this evidence through a decadeslong, multibillion-dollar disinformation campaign aimed at blocking action to phase out” its deadly products.

“The fossil fuel industry has spent decades misleading us about the harms of their products and working to prevent meaningful climate action,” said co-author Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University, in a statement. “Perversely, our governments continue to give out hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to this damaging industry. It is past time that stops.”

“The most polluted communities should be prioritized for clean energy investments and removal and cleanup of dirty fossil fuel infrastructure.”

While the researchers focused on the United States, “as the world’s largest oil and gas producer and dominant contributor to these fossil fuel crises,” their review—including proposed “science-and-justice-based solutions” for an economywide effort to “forge a path forward to sustaining life on Earth”—applies to the whole world, which is quickly heating up due to emissions from coal, gas, and oil.

The article features sections on the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis, public health harms, environmental injustice, biodiversity loss and extinction, petrochemical pollution, and industry disinformation. Each section lays out the “problem” and “solutions.”

The climate emergency section includes details such as “the production and combustion of oil, gas, and coal are responsible for nearly 90% of human-caused carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and approximately 79% of total greenhouse gas emissions,” and “failures in political will to implement necessary climate action have made the 1.5°C benchmark nearly impossible to achieve without overshoot,” referring to a primary goal of the 2015 Paris agreement.

Although the current U.S. administration has demonstrated its alliance to the fossil fuel industry—including with President Donald Trump’s recent energy emergency declaration—the scientists still emphasized what’s possible in the country.

“In the USA, powerful policy levers are available to governments and civil society at the local, state, national, and international levels to phase out fossil fuels and transition to a clean, renewable energy economy,” they wrote. “These levers include regulation (e.g. applying and enforcing existing laws), legislation (e.g. polluters pay laws, fossil fuel subsidy reform, land use laws limiting drilling), and litigation (e.g. holding fossil fuel companies accountable, defending existing law).”

They also warned that “last-ditch efforts to prolong the fossil fuel industry are proliferating. These include counterproductive false solutions, like carbon capture and storage (CCS), which would perpetuate fossil fuel use while capturing only some of the resulting emissions, and hydrogen made from fossil fuels.”

The public health section notes that “air pollution from fossil fuel combustion accounts for 8.7 million (equaling 1 in 5) premature deaths per year worldwide and 350,000 premature deaths per year in the USA. In a single year, air pollution from oil and gas production in the USA resulted in 410,000 asthma exacerbations, 2,200 new cases of childhood asthma, and 7,500 premature deaths in 2016.”

Co-author David J.X. González, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, said Monday that “we’ve got to work fast to end fossil fuel operations near our homes, schools and hospitals and trade fossil fuel infrastructure for healthy, clean energy.”

“Oil, gas, and coal will continue to condemn us to more deaths, wildlife extinctions, and extreme weather disasters unless we make dirty fossil fuels a thing of the past.”

The paper points out that “climate change is increasing incidence of physical and mental health impacts and mortality through multiple pathways: worsening extreme events including heatwaves, severe storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires; shifting ranges of disease vectors; threats to food security; and displacement and forced migration, which restrict access to healthcare and other basic services.”

“These harms, though broadly felt, also disproportionately impact marginalized communities which are already disproportionately burdened by other socioenvironmental hazards, as well as susceptible populations including young children, people with certain disabilities, people experiencing homelessness, pregnant people, people with chronic diseases, and older adults,” the publication continues.

University of Montana associate professor of environmental studies Robin Saha, another co-author, said that “decades of discriminatory policies, such as redlining, have concentrated fossil fuel development in Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor white communities, resulting in devastating consequences.”

“For far too long, these fenceline communities have been treated as sacrifice zones by greedy, callous industries,” Saha added. “The most polluted communities should be prioritized for clean energy investments and removal and cleanup of dirty fossil fuel infrastructure.”

The paper’s other co-authors are Robert Bullard of Texas Southern University, Boston University’s Jonathan J. Buonocore and Mary D. Willis, Trisia Farrelly of the Cawthron Institute, William Ripple of Oregon State University, and the Center for Biological Diversity’s Nathan Donley, John Fleming, and Shaye Wolf.

“The science can’t be any clearer that fossil fuels are killing us,” declared Wolf, the paper’s lead author and the center’s climate science director. “Oil, gas, and coal will continue to condemn us to more deaths, wildlife extinctions, and extreme weather disasters unless we make dirty fossil fuels a thing of the past. Clean, renewable energy is here, it’s affordable, and it will save millions of lives and trillions of dollars once we make it the centerpiece of our economy.”

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

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Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Continue Reading‘Fossil Fuels Are Killing Us’: Scientists Publish Sweeping Review of Industry Harms

BP has been rowing back on renewables for years. So why was it helped by ‘net zero’ banks?

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Original article by Rob Soutar republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Oil companies’ move to double down on fossil fuels should come as no surprise to anyone – not least its financers

Last week, BP’s CEO Murray Auchincloss said his company had gone “too far, too fast” in its plan to transition away from fossil fuels. BP still says it aims to be a net zero company by 2050 but it will now take a different path to the one it set out in 2021 … doubling down on fossil fuels in the meantime.

Perhaps the move shouldn’t have come as a surprise. After all, BP is a commercial enterprise with a responsibility to deliver returns for its shareholders. And since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which led many countries to prioritise energy security over long-term sustainability, oil and gas have remained reliably lucrative.

What’s more, the company made a similar announcement two years ago, saying it would be ramping up its investments in oil and gas.

But if BP had indicated such a significant change in direction so long ago, how did it continue to raise billions from banks that said they’d only do business with “net zero” companies?

Milestone moment?

At the 2021 climate talks in Glasgow, a number of the world’s leading banks made landmark pledges: to slash the footprint of their own operations and, crucially, the emissions of their lending and investment portfolios.

It was hailed as a watershed moment. In theory, the vast stockpiles of money that had supported fossil fuel expansion would now be cut off for companies without net zero ambitions. The same year, the International Energy Agency warned that there must be no new oil and gas projects if the world is to reach net zero by 2050.

Yet throughout 2023, after it said it would invest significantly more in fossil fuels, BP raised more than $5bn with help from “net zero” banks including NatWest, HSBC and Barclays.

The deals illustrate a core problem with the banks’ net zero commitments. A key condition for companies they agreed to do business with was the existence of a “credible” transition plan. But it wasn’t always clear how the banks were assessing that credibility.

Even before Auchincloss’ announcement last week, the world-leading Grantham Research Institute assessed the credibility of oil and gas companies’ transition plans – and found that BP’s fell well short.

That lack of clarity on what was “credible” left the banks with enough wriggle room to maintain relationships with huge fossil fuel companies.

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And those relationships have proved profitable. Since May 2021, global banks that have committed to net zero have poured almost $1 trillion into companies pursuing expansion of oil and gas projects that would push the world beyond its survivable limits.

Looking long-term

The policy environment has changed since Glasgow, when both fossil fuel companies and banks launched net zero targets. BP is not the only company of its kind to have “reset” its core business to oil and gas. But critics say that recent moves to boost fossil fuels and ensure quick returns are alarmingly short-sighted.

In the UK, the costs of getting to net zero are cheaper than was anticipated just five years ago, according to a recent report by the Climate Change Committee. And in a low-carbon economy, fossil fuels could nosedive – leaving the oil and gas fields currently in development as “stranded assets” with little value.

But crucially, the banks face considerable risks too. Their previous promises to work only with clients committed to the transition were made for a reason: they were feeling the pressure from climate-conscious investors.

If the banks are found to have broken these promises, they could well be held to account by regulators – not to mention see their credibility shattered in the eyes of their investors.

Reporter: Rob Soutar
Deputy editor: Chrissie Giles
Editor: Franz Wild
Fact checker: Ero Parksakoulaki
Production editor: Alex Hess

TBIJ has a number of funders, a full list of which can be found here. None of our funders have any influence over editorial decisions or output.

Original article by Rob Soutar republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Corrected a reference to “oil company’s” in the subheading in this version.

Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
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)
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Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.

Continue ReadingBP has been rowing back on renewables for years. So why was it helped by ‘net zero’ banks?

Just 36 Companies Drove Half the World’s Climate-Altering Emissions in 2023: New Report

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Original article by Sharon Kelly republished from DeSmog.

Hurricane Harvey, downgraded to a tropical storm when it hit Vidor, Texas, flooded an Exxon gas station, Sept. 1, 2017. Credit: ©Julie Dermansky

Companies and states most responsible for climate change are also those working hardest to prevent climate action, new Carbon Majors report finds.

Half of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2023 came from just three dozen companies, according to a new report released today by the Carbon Majors project, with the list dominated by coal, cement, and oil producers.

Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco, the year’s worst offender, drove 4.4 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide pollution alone in 2023, the report found.

Five publicly-traded oil companies — ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, TotalEnergies, and BP — combined to produce an additional 4.9 percent of the year’s global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, the report adds.

The Carbon Majors database builds on the innovative work published by researcher Richard Heede of the Climate Accountability Institute (CAI) begun in 2013. For the first time, instead of attributing the build-up of industrial carbon dioxide and methane emissions to each of the world’s nations, Heede managed to trace those emissions to 90 specific “carbon major” companies. Last year, the nonprofit think tank InfluenceMap collaborated with CAI to produce major updates to the database — and today’s report marks the first annual update to that report, incorporating global data from 2023.

The year’s top carbon polluters were a mix of investor-owned and state-owned or national companies — but they have one thing in common.

“They’re some of the most obstructive actors towards climate policy,” Emmett Connaire, a senior analyst at the Carbon Majors project and one of the authors of the report, told DeSmog.

“I think it kind of kills the argument from industry that they’re not responsible for their CO2 emissions because we need fossil fuels to grow,” Connaire said, “when they’re the most obstructive and trying to keep up the demand for their products in the face of the overwhelming scientific opinion.” 

Eight of the nine public companies most responsible for carbon emissions in 2023 were “highly active or strategic” in their climate lobbying, the report notes. And their lobbying efforts took aim at regulating climate-altering pollution or sought to impede the energy transition.“ Of these 9 companies, 5 score a D or below, indicating unsupportive positions on climate policy,” the new report finds, citing data from InfluenceMap’s LobbyMap database, which grades companies based on their alignment with the Paris Agreement. “The remaining 4 score only slightly higher at C-.”

Top 10 investor-owned companies: LobbyMap engagement scores.
InfluenceMap gave climate policy lobbying scores to the top 10 investor-owned companies, all oil, gas, and coal firms. Credit: Carbon Majors 2025 report

None of the five top oil companies named in the report immediately responded to a request for comment from DeSmog.

Investor-owned companies aren’t the only ones actively fighting to prevent climate action, the Carbon Majors report notes.

“State-owned companies are even more oppositional to climate regulation globally according to LobbyMap research,” the report finds, listing Saudi Aramco, Russia’s Gazprom, Mexico’s Pemex, and China’s CHN Energy among the worst actors.

“The ‘Carbon Majors’ are keeping the world hooked on fossil fuels with no plans to slow production,” former United Nations climate chief and Paris Agreement architect Christiana Figueres said in a response accompanying the report. “While states drag their heels on their Paris Agreement commitments, state-owned companies are dominating global emissions — ignoring the desperate needs of their citizens.”

A sizable majority — 80 percent — of the year’s 20 worst offenders are state-owned, the report found.

The 2025 Carbon Majors report compared the total CO2 emissions and percentage of total emissions for the top 5 state-owned (Saudi Aramco, Coal India, CHN Energy, National Iranian Oil, Jinneng Group) and top 5 investor-owned (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, TotalEnergies, BP) companies in 2023
State-owned fossil fuel companies dominated global climate emissions in 2023, compared to public companies, the Carbon Majors report noted. Credit: Carbon Majors report 2025

Throughout history, responsibility for driving climate change is concentrated among a strikingly small number of corporations, the report suggests.

Two-thirds of all fossil fuel and cement emissions worldwide from 1750 through 2023 can be traced to just 181 entities, the report finds, adding that one-third of emissions came from just 26 companies.

These findings may have significant legal consequences. During 2024, New York state and Vermont both enacted “Climate Superfund” laws that aim to hold fossil fuel producers and oil refiners responsible for the damage done by their climate-altering products — and the Carbon Majors database is a proposed tool to assess companies’ relative liabilities, according to InfluenceMap. Its earlier findings have been cited in civil lawsuits brought by U.S. cities and counties against fossil fuel producers and an inquiry in the Philippines (which has seen some of the strongest typhoons in recorded history) into corporate responsibility for human rights violations.

The report approaches companies’ contributions to climate change based on production data —  meaning that it focuses on the companies that do the drilling and mining (which helps avoid double-counting, Connaire told DeSmog). Those production figures are self-reported by companies but are widely used by governments to assess taxes and by investors in public companies. That methodology means that, for example, natural gas pipeline companies and natural gas utilities aren’t included in the report’s rankings. 

Nonetheless, natural gas producers figure among the report’s list of all-time top polluters. That includes the former Chesapeake Energy, which first rose to prominence — and some notoriety — during the shale gas fracking boom only to implode into bankruptcy in 2020. Chesapeake later emerged from bankruptcy and has since merged into the newly formed Expand Energy.

As the Carbon Majors database traces emissions throughout history, it accounts for the effects of mergers and acquisitions in the tumultuous oil industry, known for its booms and busts. “For example, the multiple smaller companies into which the Standard Oil Trust was broken up have evolved to become some of the most recognizable companies in the database today,” the report notes. “Some are direct descendants of Standard Oil, like ExxonMobil, with both Exxon and Mobil as descendants separately, and Chevron. Others have resulted from mergers with descendants of Standard Oil, such as BP and ConocoPhillips.”

Top 20 carbon majors entities by emissions, from 1854-2023: Former Soviet Union (1900-1991), China (Coal, 1945-2004), Saudi Aramco, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Gazprom, National Iranian Oil Company, BP, Shell, Coal India, Pemex, China (Cement), Poland (Coal, 1913-2001), CHN Energy, ConocoPhillips, British Coal Corporation (1947-1994), CNPC, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), Peabody Energy, TotalEnergies
The Carbon Majors database traces the historical cumulative emissions of the top individual entities, such as Chevron or the former Soviet Union, from 1854 through 2023. Credit: Carbon Majors report 2025

It also calls attention to the importance of coal pollution — not just historically, but also in 2023.

“In 2023, coal remained the largest source of emissions, contributing 41.1 percent of emissions in the database,” the new report finds, “continuing a steady increase since 2016.”

Emissions from the cement industry — also a major driver of carbon pollution — increased significantly in 2023, rising 6.5 percent year-over-year, which the Carbon Majors report noted was “the largest relative rise” found. “Four of the five companies with the greatest relative increases in emissions in 2023 were cement companies — Holcim Group, Heidelberg Materials, UltraTech Cement, and CRH — with cement emissions seeing the largest relative rise among the four commodity types.”

Cement producers aren’t the only ones, however. In fact, emissions from most of the top emitters rose in 2023, the Carbon Majors report found. 

“It is truly alarming that the largest fossil fuel companies continue to increase their emissions in the face of worsening natural disasters caused by climate change, disregarding scientific evidence that these emissions are harming us all,” said Tzeporah Berman, founder of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. “It is clearer than ever that dirty private companies, driven by profits and business as usual, will never choose to self-regulate. Governments around the world must use their power to end fossil fuel expansion and transition their economies before fossil fuel companies destroy the planet.”

Original article by Sharon Kelly republished from DeSmog.

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)
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Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Continue ReadingJust 36 Companies Drove Half the World’s Climate-Altering Emissions in 2023: New Report

Arctic Tundra Has Turned From ‘Carbon Sink to Carbon Source’ in Dangerous Flip: NOAA

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

A view of Brooks Range as seen from the Dalton Highway on May 10, 2024 in North Slope Borough, Alaska. (Photo: Lance King/Getty Images)

“This is yet one more sign, predicted by scientists, of the consequences of inadequately reducing fossil fuel pollution,” said one scientist.

Permafrost in the Arctic has stored carbon dioxide for millennia, but the annual Arctic Report Card released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a concerning shift linked to planetary heating and a rising number of wildfires in the icy region: The tundra is now emitting more carbon than it is storing.

The report card revealed that over the last year, the tundra’s temperature rose to its second-highest level on record, causing the frozen soil to melt.

The melting of the permafrost activates microbes in the soil which decompose the trapped carbon, causing it to be released into the atmosphere as planet-heating carbon dioxide and methane.

The release of fossil fuels from the permafrost is also being caused by increased Arctic wildfires, which have emitted an average of 207 million tons of carbon per year since 2003.

“Our observations now show that the Arctic tundra, which is experiencing warming and increased wildfire, is now emitting more carbon than it stores, which will worsen climate change impacts,” said Rick Spinrad, administrator of NOAA. “This is yet one more sign, predicted by scientists, of the consequences of inadequately reducing fossil fuel pollution.”

Sue Natali, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts and one of 97 international scientists who contributed to the Arctic Report Card, told NPR that 1.5 trillion tons of carbon are still being stored in the tundra—suggesting that the continued warming of the permafrost could make it a huge source of planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.

Along with the “Arctic tundra transformation from carbon sink to carbon source,” NOAA reported declines in caribou herds and increasing winter precipitation.

The report card showed that the autumn of 2023 and summer of 2024 saw the second- and third-warmest temperatures on record across the Arctic, and a heatwave in August 2024 set an all-time record for daily temperatures in several communities in northern Alaska and Canada.

The last nine years have been the nine warmest on record in the Arctic region.

“Many of the Arctic’s vital signs that we track are either setting or flirting with record-high or record-low values nearly every year,” said Gerald (J.J.) Frost, a senior scientist with Alaska Biological Research, Inc. and a veteran Arctic Report Card author. “This is an indication that recent extreme years are the result of long-term, persistent changes, and not the result of variability in the climate system.”

Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, emphasized that the continuous release of fossil fuel emissions from oil and gas extraction and other pollution has caused the Arctic to warm at a faster rate than the Earth as a whole over the past 11 years.

“These combined changes are contributing to worsening wildfires and thawing permafrost to an extent so historic that it caused the Arctic to be a net carbon source after millennia serving as a net carbon storage region,” said Ekwurzel. “If this becomes a consistent trend, it will further increase climate change globally.”

The Arctic Report Card was released weeks before President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office. Trump has pledged to slash climate regulations introduced by the Biden administration and to increase oil and gas production. He has mused that sea-level rise will create “more oceanfront property” and has called the climate crisis a “hoax,” while his nominee for energy secretary, Chris Wright, the CEO of the fracking company Liberty Energy, has claimed that climate warming is good for the planet.

“These sobering impacts in the Arctic are one more manifestation of how policymakers in the United States and around the world are continuing to prioritize the profits of fossil fuel polluters over the well-being of people and the planet and putting the goals of the Paris climate agreement in peril,” said Ekwurzel. “All countries, but especially wealthy, high-emitting nations, need to drastically reduce heat-trapping emissions at a rapid pace in accord with the latest science and aid in efforts of climate-vulnerable communities to prepare for what’s to come and help lower-resourced countries working to decrease emissions too.”

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

Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Continue ReadingArctic Tundra Has Turned From ‘Carbon Sink to Carbon Source’ in Dangerous Flip: NOAA