Today’s climate crisis is already worse than scientists predicted, yet governments continue to pour billions of dollars of public funds into the single-biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions: fossil fuels. Activists have been protesting against this for years, and now we’re seeing the fight spill into courtrooms. In the face of climate breakdown, civil society is sending a clear message: governments that continue to use taxpayers’ money to fund fossil fuels should expect a lawsuit.
Litigation has the power to make or break fossil fuel expansion. With more than 2,000 cases filed across the globe since 2017, climate litigation has, so far, focused on the shortcomings of government or company policies, challenging inadequate emissions reduction targets or reparations linked to climate damages. Today, we’re seeing a new wave of climate litigation focused on institutions that channel public finance towards fossil fuels – with recent lawsuits in Australia, the UK, Mozambique, Brazil, South Korea and beyond.
These lawsuits allow citizens to take back control over their public finances and force public financial institutions – whose investments are notoriously opaque – to become more transparent. One critical step governments can take to avoid such lawsuits is to live up to their commitments and come to a global agreement on oil and gas export finance restrictions at an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) meeting coming up in mid-March.
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The UK, Canada and EU already tabled a proposal for such restrictions which, with sufficient support, can succeed in limiting public finance for fossil fuels. This would free up billions of dollars that can be reinvested in reliable, affordable and secure renewable energy, efficiency measures, and facilitating a just transition. To achieve this, getting the US on side is key, after which remaining OECD members will likely follow. If President Biden is serious about tackling climate change, it’s vital that he backs strong measures to stop international finance for fossil fuels.
Despite the US, as well as several G20 countries and major multilateral development banks (MDBs), committing to end international public finance for fossil fuel projects by the end of 2022, they continue to pour billions of dollars into international fossil fuel projects. Data also shows that far more public money goes into fossil fuels than renewables or energy efficiency measures. G20 governments and MDBs provided at least $55 billion for fossil fuels each year from 2019-2021, while allocating only $29 billion to renewables. Bankrolling these toxic industries is fundamentally incompatible with limiting global heating to 1.5C, which, according to the International Energy Agency, requires an immediate stop to investments in new coal, oil, gas and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) infrastructure.
State support for gas exports
A crucial part of this fight is holding Export Credit Agencies (ECAs) and similar development institutions accountable. ECAs are government-owned or controlled institutions that provide financing, often at subsidised rates, to large infrastructure projects around the world. ECAs are the world’s largest public financiers of fossil fuels, providing seven times more support for fossil fuels ($34 billion) than clean energy projects ($4.7 billion) between 2019 and 2021.
Without government-backed finance, these projects may not otherwise go ahead. This is especially true for the expansion of more than 80% of new LNG exports over the last decade. While President Biden’s recent announcement of a pause in approvals for new LNG export terminals in the US is welcome, we need to make much more rapid progress to stay within safe planetary limits. A crucial part of this fight is holding ECAs to account and governments to comply with international law.
Civil society groups are turning to the courts. The NGO Jubilee is suing Export Finance Australia and the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility for failing to adequately report the environmental effects and climate impacts linked to their financing activities, which play a crucial role in determining how ECAs disclose relevant information.
Last year, Friends of the Earth UK took the UK’s ECA to court over its investment in a major LNG project in Mozambique. Friends of the Earth argued that the $1.15 billion in export finance support was unlawful, inconsistent with the latest science, and incompatible with the Paris Agreement. Although the court ruled in favour of the ECA, the case exerted enough pressure to stop funding for new overseas fossil fuel projects. Without the publicised court battle flagging the issue for the UK public and policymakers, this result may never have been achieved.
In Brazil, the human rights NGO Conectas sued the Brazilian Development Bank for failing to assess the negative climate impacts of its investments. Similarly, South Korean ECAs were challenged over the funding they provided for the Australian Barossa gas pipeline project, which would run through a protected marine park, forcing the financiers to review the necessity of LNG imports, as well as their environmental impacts.
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At COP26, 34 governments, including a majority of OECD members, signed up to the Clean Energy Transition Partnership (CETP), pledging to end international public finance for unabated fossil fuels by the end of 2022. Despite this, governments are failing to keep their promises and continue to fund international fossil fuel projects. The Jubilee case comes at a time when Australia announced its commitment to the CETP – we now need to see policies follow commitments. Put simply: when governments make promises, they need to keep them, or the courtroom awaits.
Maria Alejandra Vesga Correa is a legal officer in the global public finance team at Oil Change International. Leanne Govindsamy is programme head for corporate accountability and transparency at the Centre for Environmental Rights. Lorenzo Fiorilli is a lawyer working on public finance, energy markets and competition with ClientEarth.
The post When governments fund fossil fuels, it’s time to take them to court appeared first on Climate Home News.
When governments fund fossil fuels, it’s time to take them to court
Climate Change
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Climate Change
Revealed: Scientists tell Colombia fossil-fuel transition summit to ‘halt new expansion’
Countries attending a first-of-its-kind fossil-fuel summit have been asked to consider “action recommendations” such as “halting all new fossil-fuel expansion” and “reject[ing] gas as a bridging fuel”, according to a preliminary scientific report seen by Carbon Brief.
Around 50 nations will gather in Santa Marta, Colombia from 24-29 April to debate ways to “transition away” from fossil fuels, in the face of worsening climate change and sky-high oil prices.
The talks come after a large group of nations campaigned for, but ultimately failed, to get all countries to formally agree to a “roadmap” away from fossil fuels at the COP30 climate summit in Brazil in November.
The nations gathering in Santa Marta for the summit co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands, call themselves the “coalition of the willing”.
Ahead of country officials arriving in Santa Marta, a global group of academics will gather in the city this week to present and discuss the latest scientific evidence on fossil-fuel phaseout, which will then inform debate among policymakers.
A preliminary scientific “synthesis report” circulated to governments attending the talks and seen by Carbon Brief offers 12 “action insights” for countries to consider, along with a wide range of “action recommendations”.
These recommendations range from “phase out subsidies on fossil-fuel production and consumption” to “kick-start a forum to develop a legal framework to ban fossil-fuel advertisements”.
‘Rapid’ assessment
The preliminary scientific report seen by Carbon Brief – titled, “Action insights for the Santa Marta process” – is the result of some rapid work by an “ad-hoc” group of around 24 scientists.
It is designed to present governments attending the talks with concrete and actionable recommendations for transitioning away from fossil fuels.
The preliminary version, which includes recommendations such as “halting all new fossil fuel expansion”, has already been circulated to governments, with a view that this could help them to prepare for the talks in advance.
It will be further debated and refined by scientists attending the academic segment of the Santa Marta talks, before a final version is made public towards the end of April, Carbon Brief understands.
The process to produce the report began shortly after the conclusion of the COP30 climate summit in Brazil in November, explains its lead author, Dr Friedrich Bohn, a research scientist and co-founder of the Earth Resilience Institute in Germany. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When [Brazil] announced there would be a Santa Marta conference led by Colombia and the Netherlands, I was sitting listening with a small group of scientists. We thought: ‘This is great news, but it should be supported by scientific expertise.’”
One of the members of Bohn’s group had a pre-existing relationship with the Colombian government, allowing a dialogue to quickly be established, he continues:
“In the beginning, the idea was to just write a peer-reviewed paper. But, because of this close connection to the Colombian government and some feedback from them, the synthesis paper evolved.”
The report came out of a “very rapidly evolved process” that relied on the “goodwill” and “enthusiasm” of the academics involved, adds coordinating author Prof Frank Jotzo, a professor of climate change economics at Australian National University. (Jotzo is a former Carbon Brief contributing editor.) He tells Carbon Brief:
“It’s an attempt to get broad coverage on relevant topics from researchers with good expertise and reputation.”
The group of 24 scientists involved spent around two months compiling the “action insights” for the report, drawing on their expertise and the latest available research, says Jotzo.
Given the rapid nature of the report, it does not aim to be “completist”, has not been externally reviewed and did not follow a stringent process for author selection comparable to that used by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, he adds.
The contributors to the report currently skew to the global north and include more men than women, adds Bohn.
‘Direct guidance’
In a departure from IPCC reports, the preliminary Santa Marta synthesis report offers “very direct guidance to action”, says Jotzo.
The report lists 12 “action insights”, each with three “action recommendations”. (The list was cut down from a shortlist of about 40-50 insights, Carbon Brief understands.)
One of the most striking in the draft is “action insight 5”, which says:
“Take immediate measures to prevent future emissions. Ban new fossil infrastructure, mandate deep methane cuts, accelerate electrification and inscribe fossil-fuel phase-down targets in NDCs [nationally determined contributions] and clean-energy pathways support to low and middle income countries (LMICs).”
The accompanying three “action recommendations” include “halting all new fossil-fuel extraction and infrastructure projects ahead of a final investment decision”, “implementing deep, legally binding methane cuts in the energy sector” and “inscrib[ing] targets for fossil-fuel phase down, electrification and green exports in NDCs”.
(The draft report includes multiple references to “phasing out” and “phasing down” fossil fuels, rather than the “transition away from fossil fuels” language that was, ultimately, agreed by countries at the COP28 UN climate talks in Dubai in 2023.)
Another action insight says “public support for climate action is broadly underestimated and undermined by interest groups, but it can be strengthened by debunking greenwashing narratives”.
One recommendation for this insight is that nations “reject natural gas as a bridging technology and CCS [carbon capture and storage] techniques as scalable compensation”.
In a letter introducing the report to governments and civil society, the scientists note that making direct recommendations is a “challenge for our community”, but added:
“However, in the spirit of a constructive collaboration between science and policymaking, we allowed ourselves to identify some potential courses of action that our community would recommend for each particular issue – and we invite you to weigh these against your own circumstances and pick up whatever seems most useful for you and your colleagues.”
The prescriptiveness of the recommendations – something strictly prohibited in IPCC reports – was an explicit request from the Colombian government, Bohn says:
“The idea of actionable recommendations was introduced by the Colombian government.
“There was some discussion within the team about this. It’s a tricky area when you leave science and move to consultation. Therefore, we agreed, in the end, to call them ‘actionable recommendations’ and to make them as precise as possible, from the scientific perspective.”
Jotzo, a veteran of the IPCC process, tells Carbon Brief that it was “very liberating” to work on a report with a “free-form process”:
“The bulk of policy-related research is very readily deployed to recommendations pointing out what countries could do. The IPCC process, for example, just doesn’t allow that. As far as the summary for policymakers in the IPCC is concerned, it will usually be governments that filter out anything that could be interpreted as a specific recommendation.”
He adds that the hope is that some of the action insights might be reflected in the high-level segment of the Santa Marta conference:
“No one is under any illusions that governments will walk away from the Santa Marta conference and will have made a decision to implement recommendations one, seven and nine – or something like that. But it is a chance to insert directly applicable action points into national and plurilateral policy agendas.”
Colombia calling
The preliminary report will be further debated and refined by scientists attending the “pre-academic segment” of the Santa Marta talks.
This is taking place from 24-26 April, ahead of the “high-level segment” involving ministers and other policymakers from 28-29 April.
The pre-academic segment will also separately see the launch of a new advisory panel on fossil-fuel transition and a scientifically led roadmap for how Colombia can transition away from fossil fuels, Carbon Brief understands.
The high-level segment is expected to be attended by representatives from around 50 countries, including COP31 host Turkey and major oil-and-gas producers such as the UK, Canada, Australia, Brazil and Norway.
Countries expected to attend account for one-third of global fossil-fuel demand and one-fifth of global production, according to the Colombian government.
At the end of the conference, countries are due to release a report featuring a “menu of solutions” for transitioning away from fossil fuels, according to Colombia’s environment minister Irene Vélez Torres.
This report is in turn set to inform a global “roadmap” on transitioning away from fossil fuels being developed by the Brazilian COP30 presidency, which is due to be presented at COP31 in Turkey this November.
The Brazilian COP30 presidency offered to bring forward a “voluntary” fossil-fuel transition “roadmap” outside of the official COP process, after countries failed to formally agree to one during negotiations in Belém.
The post Revealed: Scientists tell Colombia fossil-fuel transition summit to ‘halt new expansion’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Revealed: Scientists tell Colombia fossil-fuel transition summit to ‘halt new expansion’
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Revealed: Scientists tell Colombia fossil-fuel transition summit to ‘halt new expansion’
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