At the end of May, the leaders of Australia’s fossil fuel extraction industry and their enablers in business and government descended on the Brisbane Convention Centre for the annual Australian Energy Producers (AEP) conference.
This time Greenpeace was there to send a message they couldn’t ignore: all members of this fossil fuel lobby group are complicit in fuelling the climate crisis. For companies claiming to support climate action, it’s time to cut ties with the AEP!
With an amazing team of volunteers, we covered the conference surrounds with posters, handed out hundreds of ‘Special Program Supplements’ as people entered the venue, decorated the bathroom mirrors with some cheeky slogans to force attendees to seriously 
reflect, and had our message heard in the media too!
(Keep scrolling for more photos)
And this is just the start.
Australian Energy Producers: the dodgiest fossil fuel lobby group you’ve never heard of
Though not a household name, Australian Energy Producers has an outsized influence on Australian politics. It is the peak body for the fossil fuel industry, comprising approximately 200 members who collectively produce around 95% of Australia’s oil and gas.
Since 1959, the AEP have actively opposed science-aligned climate policies that would control the pollution of the fossil fuel industry. Today, the group continues to aggressively advocate for dirty gas projects like Woodside’s North West Shelf and spend big on ad campaigns to influence public perception of fossil fuels.
Some of its members are the usual suspects: fossil fuel giants like Woodside, Shell, Santos, and Exxon-Mobil.
But you might be surprised to hear that not everyone in AEP are fossil fuel producers. Groups like UNSW, Curtin University, ANZ, PwC, EY, Deloitte and KPMG also hold membership in this profit-hungry group that lobbies for more dirty gas on their behalf.
Warning: If your company or university is a member of this fossil fuel lobby group, you are supporting a toxic industry and may even be at risk of legal action. Find out more
What did Greenpeace do at the AEP conference?
Instead of telling you exactly everything we did, why not put yourself in the shoes of the audience we hoped to reach with our creative interventions:
You work at an AEP member company like PwC and you’re on your way to the conference on Monday morning. Most of the time you feel pretty good about your job and your company. You’re proud of your company’s strong commitments to reaching net zero emissions and you brought your keep-cup to the event. As you search for the entrance your reflection catches you off guard on the opposite wall. It’s a Greenpeace poster embedded with a shiny mirror, calling the conference “a meeting of Australia’s biggest climate deniers.” You keep walking.
Later that day you check your LinkedIn App to see if any of your networking has paid off in new connection requests. *Sigh* only a post in your feed and a DM from Greenpeace with another dig about the fossil fuel lobby group.
You start to feel a little uncomfortable.
Day 2:
A friendly volunteer with a suit and lanyard points you in the direction of the conference and offers you a Special Program Supplement. Great, you needed one of those!
On your way into the first session you make a pit stop in the bathroom. Washing your hands afterwards you have to rub your eyes a few times to check if you’re starting to imagine things. Nope, it’s real. Right above your reflection is a sign clear as day “I’m the problem, it’s me.”
PwC isn’t the problem though…we do our part on climate, you think! But the words sound emptier than they did before.
Once inside you take your seat and open up the program supplement.
It reads: Australian Energy Producers is a fossil fuel lobby group who is fuelling climate change. And now we have found out who is really behind them…
YOU.
Just like Big Tobacco lied about cigarettes being safe, Big Gas is lying to you about fossil fuels. Drilling for more gas is incompatible with a safe climate.
The person to your right notices the mirror in your program and leans over to take a look. You both laugh it off and roll your eyes, but you’re starting to feel a bit sick. You reach into your bag to grab a notebook and notice another “I’m the problem sticker” that’s stuck between the pages.
You’d like to get out for some air. But Woodside CEO Meg O’Neil is on a tirade blaming young people for climate change and it would be an awkward moment to stand up. You clap politely instead.
Gas is a dirty fossil fuel driving dangerous climate change
In spite of the enormous advertising budgets used by Australian Energy Producers and many of its members to make gas seem ‘clean’ and ‘natural,’ gas is a polluting fossil fuel!!! Do we need to say it louder for the people in the back?
Coal, oil and gas account for over 75% of the global greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change. Gas is primarily made up of methane, which is even more polluting than carbon dioxide. When burned for energy, gas produces carbon dioxide. In Australia, gas accounts for at least 21% of carbon dioxide emissions. But methane and carbon dioxide also leak out into the atmosphere at every stage of gas production and transport, and tracking technology shows that more dangerous greenhouse gasses are released than are officially measured. When the processing and transportation of liquefied natural gas (LNG) are taken into account, there’s nothing “clean” about it: gas is a more polluting fossil fuel than coal.
New gas is incompatible with the world’s goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees
The protest sought to increase pressure on the Australian government to commit to a timeline for a fair and fast phase out away from all fossil fuels, starting with no more coal and gas.
Australia is the world’s third largest exporter of fossil fuels, and the Newcastle Port is the world’s largest coal export port. On the final day of the “protestival”, 170 people were arrested while out in their kayaks blocking the channel to prevent coal ships from passing, successfully forcing one coal ship to turn around.
While Australian Energy Producers like to say “we don’t get to net zero without natural gas” – and use this as justification for further gas expansion, the reality is we won’t get to net zero with new gas.
The International Energy Agency’s landmark Net Zero by 2050 report concluded that no new investment in oil, gas or coal is needed to reach net zero by 2050. Reaching net zero globally by 2050 is essential to limit global warming to 1.5C, in keeping with the Paris Agreement temperature goal – a legally binding international treaty on climate change which Australia is a Party to.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that existing fossil fuel projects could already push us past the 1.5C target. There is a large consensus that new oil and gas projects are fundamentally incompatible with the Paris Agreement, confirmed by the International Institute for Sustainable Development.The good news is, we don’t need to – as around 80% of Australia’s gas is currently exported, and demand for gas is falling domestically as we electrify everything and consumers look for alternatives because of high gas prices. And there is much more that can be done to reduce gas demand and power our homes and businesses with clean energy instead.
Time to quit Australian Energy Producers?
While climate change accelerates, Australian Energy Producers keep pushing fossil fuel interests. Claiming to support Net Zero while acting in ways that would make it impossible to attain simply doesn’t cut it in 2025.
Any company who is an Associate Member of AEP is complicit.
But if companies and universities want to stand on the right side of history, it’s not too late to cut ties with the AEP and cancel their membership.
We need everyone on board to support the renewable energy solutions that will power the clean transition and provide sustainable, well paid jobs, while we work together to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
Is your company an AEP member? Email us at Quit-AEP@greenpeace.org for more information on how you can raise this issue as an employee.
Not an AEP member but still concerned about its fossil fuel agenda? Sign the petition for no new fossil fuels!
The governor’s office said the city’s two main reservoirs could dry up by May, much sooner than previous timelines. But authorities still offer no plan for curtailment of water use.
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Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.
The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.
With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.
Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile
On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.
At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia.
We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.
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Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.
Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.
Agroecology as an alternative
There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency.
In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.
In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.
New summit in Colombia seeks to revive stalled UN talks on fossil fuel transition
Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.
These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.
Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products
We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.
As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.
This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.
The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.
Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems
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