The Guardian is out with an exclusive, explosive report based on months of research that documents the scores of new projects fossil fuel companies are proposing, enough to wipe out the world’s remaining carbon budget and shatter any effort to hold global warming to 1.5°C.
“The fossil fuel industry’s short-term expansion plans involve the start of oil and gas projects that will produce greenhouse gases equivalent to a decade of CO2 emissions from China, the world’s biggest [carbon] polluter,” the UK-based newspaper reports. “These plans include 195 carbon bombs, gigantic oil and gas projects that would each result in at least a billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over their lifetimes, in total equivalent to about 18 years of current global CO2 emissions. About 60% of these have already started pumping.”
The world’s dozen biggest oil companies are on track to spend US$103 million per day through the end of this decade, “exploiting new fields of oil and gas that cannot be burned if global heating is to be limited to well under 2.0°,” The Guardian adds.
The story cites the United States, Canada, and Australia “among the countries with the biggest expansion plans and the highest number of carbon bombs,” as well as some of the highest per capita fossil fuel subsidies.
“This is crucial work by @dpcarrington and Matthew Taylor,” tweeted activist and essayist George Monbiot. “The oil companies, unless governments step up to stop them now, will destroy everything, pushing Earth systems past their critical thresholds. By everything, I mean everything.”
“This is, essentially, a pre-emptive criminal investigation,” added writer Eliz Mizon. “This is how oil barons are burning millions of lives.”
This is a brilliant piece of investigative reporting, and we can’t do it justice with a quick summary. So pull up a chair and click through for the longer read—the main post here, a second story here on the 140 billion tonnes of emissions that could be unleashed by the oil and gas fracking boom in the United States.
Exclusive: Oil and gas majors are planning scores of vast projects that threaten to shatter the 1.5C climate goal. If governments do not act, these firms will continue to cash in as the world burns
by Damian Carrington and Matthew Taylor
Why is this still being allowed to happen?
Energy transitions or additions?: Why a transition from fossil fuels requires more than the growth of renewable energy
Richard York and Shannon Bell
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2019.01.008
Abstract
Is an energy transition currently in progress, where renewable energy sources are replacing fossil fuels? Previous changes in the proportion of energy produced by various sources – such as in the nineteenth century when coal surpassed biomass in providing the largest share of the global energy supply and in the twentieth century when petroleum overtook coal – could more accurately be characterized as energy additions rather than transitions. In both cases, the use of the older energy source continued to grow, despite rapid growth in the new source. Evidence from contemporary trends in energy production likewise suggest that as renewable energy sources compose a larger share of overall energy production, they are not replacing fossil fuels but are rather expanding the overall amount of energy that is produced. We argue that although it is reasonable to expect that renewables will come to provide a growing share of the global energy supply, it is misleading to characterize this growth in renewable energy as a “transition” and that doing so could inhibit the implementation of meaningful policies aimed at reducing fossil fuel use.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214629618312246
And:
“It is important to recognise that the transition is, as its derivation suggests, a process of moving from one state to another, and if it is to be successful must involve the managed decline of the existing energy system as well as its transformation towards a future state,” James Henderson and Anupama Sen of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (OIES) wrote in a paper last month.
We are still stuck in a conception of climate mitigation that is critically flawed: the best science is adamant that we need at least a 50% emission reduction by 2030 but we are trapped in an ‘energy transition’ conception where this essential rate of emission reduction isn’t remotely possible. And this conception of mitigation keeps fossil fuels in the game until they are supposedly out competed by renewables, which hasn’t happened, isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
Instead of focusing upon the real mitigation path now needed.
Instead of focusing upon regulating a wind-down or managed decline of fossil fuel production and use which could reduce emissions at a scale needed.
Instead of recognizing that we need to power down to a socio-economy using far less energy and raw materials not just ‘transition’ to a different energy source in BAU.
Staying in the energy transition conception of mitigation when we must know that building renewables is not going to displace or in any other way phase out fossil fuels is climate denial. And we should know better. Messaging within this now untenable conception of mitigation and not insisting upon a regulated end of fossil fuel production has mis-informed publics and policymakers and is allowing investment in the carbon bombs set to trigger catastrophic climate breakdown.
Why? Because CCNow and almost everybody mainstream writing about climate stay within this conception of mitigation that we all want: 100% renewables solves the climate problem within political and economic BAU with only minor tweaks to our very fortunate lifestyles.
But in truth we owe effective mitigation to innocents effected today and all generations in the future and after wasting three decades this must now mean disruptive, deep systemic change.
Messaging within the ‘energy transition’ is inhibiting the implementation of meaningful policies which could reduce fossil fuel use. This is a huge climate story – instead we just get more details on how hooped we are and how the fossils are working to make it worse.