Countries that vowed to halt global warming are expanding their fossil fuels, report finds

If current projections hold, the United States will drill for more oil and gas in 2030 than ever before in its history. Russia and Saudi Arabia plan to do the same.

They are among the world’s fossil fuel majors that are collectively on track this decade to produce twice as much fossil fuels as a critical global warming threshold allows, according to a United Nations-backed report released Wednesday.

The report, which looks at 20 major fossil fuel producing countries, underlines the wide gap between world leaders’ lofty promises to take stronger action on climate change and their countries’ actual production plans.

This month, leaders will meet at a global climate summit in Dubai to discuss how to reduce their global warming emissions. But despite strong opposition from major fossil fuel producers, climate conferences have so far shied away from discussing a fossil fuel phase-out.

Emissions from burning coal, oil and gas are the leading cause of global warming, which is already worsening storms, floods, heat waves, wildfires and droughts. Scientists say it’s more likely than not that 2023 will be the hottest year on record.

“We cannot tackle the climate catastrophe without tackling its root cause: dependence on fossil fuels,” said António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations.

“Fossil fuel emissions are already causing climate chaos, destroying lives and livelihoods,” he said. Yet “governments are literally doubling fossil fuel production.”

Nearly every country signed the Paris Agreement in 2015, the global climate pact that aims to limit the increase in global average temperatures to well below 2 degrees Celsius, and ideally no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2 .7 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to pre-industrial levels.

And over the past decade, governments and companies have made progress in moving away from fossil fuels, such as ramping up wind and solar energy and investing in electric vehicle infrastructure.

Still, the report published Wednesday, led by researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute, shows that countries around the world plan to continue increasing coal production until 2030, and oil and gas production for decades after that.

That means the world remains on track to produce about 110 percent more oil, gas and coal by 2030, which would be permissible if governments wanted to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the researchers warned. The world would also exceed by 69 percent the amount of fossil fuels consistent with limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

Above these thresholds, the world faces the danger of irreversible and catastrophic damage from climate change, scientists say. The planet has already warmed an average of 1.2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.

There are some signs of progress. In September, the first official report on the Global Climate Pact said that the absolute worst-case climate change scenarios feared in the early 2010s seemed far less likely today. The authors partly credited countries’ burgeoning efforts to rein in their emissions under the 2015 Paris Agreement, and the rapid growth of clean energy.

Last month, the world’s largest energy agency predicted that global demand for fossil fuels could peak by 2030 if policies promoting cleaner forms of energy and transportation take hold.

However, that prediction was criticized by the oil-producing countries themselves: the OPEC oil cartel warned that such predictions could lead countries to underinvest in oil and gas projects, leading to a lack of supply and ‘energy chaos’.

Wednesday’s report puts the responsibility for reducing fossil fuel production squarely on the world’s richest countries. For each fossil fuel – coal, oil or gas – the combined production levels planned by the ten highest-income countries alone would warm the world by more than 1.5 degrees by 2040, says Ploy Achakulwisut, who led the study .

State-owned companies control about half of the world’s oil and gas production, and more than half of coal production. But even in countries like the United States, where the private sector is dominant, government policies such as fossil fuel subsidies and tax breaks continue to support production. Global Fossil fuel subsidies rose to a record $7 trillion last year, according to a count by the International Monetary Fund. That’s more than governments around the world spend on education every year.

Some countries with significant reserves of fossil fuels are now competing to be the last remaining producers, even as the overall market begins to slow, saying they can drill for fossil fuels more cleanly than their competitors, the researchers said.

“But when you add all these factors together, it leads to the production gap,” said Michael Lazarus, co-author of the report. “It is the desire of every country to maximize its own production.”