Planned Global Fossil-Fuel Production ‘Dangerously Out Of Sync’ With Climate Goals, UN Report Warns

From iPolitics: Countries around the world are planning to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels by 2030 than would be consistent with limiting average global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees celsius, a new United Nations report warns.

• The report, titled the “Production Gap,” states: “Governments’ planned fossil fuel production remains dangerously out of sync with Paris Agreement limits," a finding largely unchanged from its 2019 report.
• In August, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that an average 1.5 degrees global temperature increase would result in “extreme events unprecedented in the observational record.”

As noted by iPolitics on Wednesday, the report examined 15 fossil-fuel producing countries, including Canada.

• The report states G20 countries have directed more new funding towards fossil fuel projects than clean energy since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and notes that most major oil and gas companies are planning to increase production until 2030 and beyond.

The report notes the Canadian government directed $320 million through the Oil and Gas Industry Recovery Assistance Fund to support Newfoundland and Labrador’s offshore oil industry, and $1.7 billion to help provincial governments clean up orphan wells that private corporations failed to remediate themselves.

Vanessa Corkal, a policy adviser at the International Institute for Sustainable Development and one of the UN report’s authors, told iPolitics:

• “Canada has recently increased its climate ambition. Our net-zero target is now in law (through Bill C-12), but we need to go further and faster than this to ensure a climate safe future. Reaching those targets (won’t) be possible without rapidly reducing emissions from the oil and gas sector.”

In the recent federal election, the Liberal Party promised to cap emissions from the oil and gas sector “at a pace and scale needed to achieve net-zero by 2050,” iPolitics noted.

• Corkal told iPolitics that while that proposal is promising, the policy’s effectiveness will depend on how it is implemented.

She explained: “There has to be an overall limit for the sector. There’s a danger, if it’s created by company or by type of fuel, that (it won’t) decrease overall emissions from the whole sector.”

Read iPolitics’ full story here.