oil

By various - Chief Sustainability Office, Los Angeles, December 10, 2022

By various - Fossil Free California, November 22, 2022

By Lopa Pal, Elizabeth Bast, Nnimmo Bassey, Colin Rees, and Rebecca Solnit - Oil Change International, November 7, 2022

By staff - US Chemical Safety Board, October 27, 2022

By Cara Bottorff, Noah Ver Beek, and Leah Stokes - Sierra Club, October 2022

Rapidly cleaning up the electric sector is key to achieving our climate goals. We need electric utilities to retire coal plants, cancel plans to build new gas plants, and accelerate clean energy deployment to achieve 80 percent clean electricity by 2030 and 100 percent clean electricity by 2035. This is in line with the United States’ climate commitments and scientific consensus of what is needed for a livable planet.

Many utilities have pledged to clean up their electricity production, but our research shows these promises often amount to little more than greenwashing. In our 2021 report, released a year and a half ago, we analyzed the plans of 77 utilities owned by the 50 parent companies most invested in fossil fuel generation. We found that despite pledges to reduce emissions from many of these companies, most utilities did not have plans that would actually achieve the necessary emissions reductions by 2030.1, 2 This updated report investigates what progress, if any, these utilities made over the last year and a half to turn their pledges into real action. We want to know: have utilities stepped up to meet the challenge and make the changes needed to save lives, reduce costs, and address climate change by transforming our power system?

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Neil Rothnie, Vivian Price and Gabrielle Zeliazkov - Global Climate Jobs, September 16, 2022

By R.C. Smith - PhD Dissertation, September 1, 2022

Oil and finance have long played central roles in defining how the global economy has developed and this is especially true of the modern neoliberal economic system. One factor of their relationship that is often unexamined is how oil industry profits and liquid capital influence the developments of finance. Understanding their relationship during the modern period first requires understanding this petrocapital cycle, how it influences economic development, and the ways that its rise to prominence in the 1970s transformed the global capitalist financial system.

We are living in a world that has been shaped by the demands of oil and finance. Under the neoliberal capitalist order these two sectors enjoyed central roles in setting the pace of the global economy. Shocks in the price of oil, as recent events like the record-high oil prices experienced following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine have reminded us, tend not to stay confined to the fuel pump and radiate throughout our economic system. One particular avenue of influence that is often not seen but is widely felt is the reinvestment of oil profits in global financial markets. This question was first thoroughly examined in Mahmoud el-Gamal and Amy Myers Jaffe’s Oil, Dollars, Debt, and Crises: The Global Curse of Black Gold which traced the relationships that formed the endogenous petrocapital cycle, which is the reinvestment of the profits reaped by oil exporters in financial markets and how this changed global credit and financial markets. The Real Oil Shock builds on their earlier work by digging deeper into the birth of this process in the Oil Shocks of the 1970s. It will do this by examining how OPEC’s windfall capital fundamentally changed financial markets, practices, and the creation of money.

What The Real Oil Shock is examining is not a new phenomenon in economic history. The human experience abounds with instances where dramatic redistributions of wealth and resources created significant changes in the existing social and economic order. An excellent example comes from the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Exploitation of gold, silver, and other precious metals in the Americas provided the Spanish monarchy with an enormous windfall of liquid capital. This was spent by the Spanish monarchy on projects of the state, fighting wars, and expanding their influence in Europe. This put increasing quantities of Spanish doubloons in circulation outside of domestic markets. Spanish gold had become the capital for Dutch, English, and French merchants for financing their own commercial, industrial, and colonial enterprises whose activities were the foundation of early modern capitalism in Europe.

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By Jackson Chiappinelli, Dustin Renaud, and Kendall Dix - Earthjustice, June 29, 2022

Amid climate crisis and record gas prices, new analysis debunks oil and gas industry claims on need for new federal leasing by offering further evidence that ending new federal offshore leasing would not raise gas prices for nearly two decades, and would have virtually no net economic impact.

According to a new report out today, putting an end to new federal offshore leasing on public waters for the next five years:

• Would result in less than a cent increase in gas prices at the pump over the next two decades
• Would still maintain close to current levels of oil production capabilities for many years
• Would not have the drastic impact on workers in the Gulf or the national economy that the fossil fuel industry has purported. Industry’s claims about economic impacts fail to account for the ways that energy and job markets gradually adapt and the burdensome climate costs averted from transitioning to clean energy
• Result in between $23 billion and $365 billion dollars in climate benefits through 2040

The new report, which was supported by Earthjustice, Healthy Gulf, and Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy (GCCLP) and published by Apogee Economics and Policy, a leader in energy production forecasts and benefit-cost assessments related to energy development, rebuts industry claims that ending leasing would significantly impact production and the economy. Instead, the report provides analysis that shows that the Biden administration can end new leases for the next five years without raising gas prices, preventing oil production, and negatively impacting jobs. The new report supports the opportunity for moving the United States away from fossil fuels and meaningfully addressing the worsening climate crisis, instead of giving into demands by the oil and gas industry to double down on decades of more carbon pollution.

For years, oil and gas development has contributed to worsening climate impacts, devastation for Gulf communities, environmental destruction, and dangerous conditions for offshore workers. Because federal offshore leasing locks in development for decades, putting an end to leasing is essential if the Biden administration is going to meet its national climate pollution and Paris Agreement targets and environmental justice commitments.

The new report comes just ahead of the release of the Interior Department’s next five-year offshore oil and gas leasing program. In the upcoming program, Interior will propose a schedule of federal offshore oil and gas lease sales for the next five years and has the option to not hold any new lease sales over that five-year period.

By Peter Mencini, et. al. - Amazon Watch, May 31, 2023

By Simon Pirani - Open Democracy, May 20, 2022

We must cut Russian fossil fuel imports and change our energy use, to combat both the cost of living crisis and the global climate crisis.

Three months into the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine, European politicians and officials are working out plans to reduce fossil fuel imports from Russia to zero.

This week, the European Commission published a plan to end Russian gas imports by 2027. Climate campaign groups say it can be done much sooner.

This is a historic turning point. Gas imports from Russia started in the 1960s and came to symbolise not only a flourishing trading relationship with Europe, but also a geopolitical partnership that survived the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.

How strong is the case for Europe’s labour movement and civil society to support sanctions against the Russian economy, and specifically against Russian fossil fuels? Which sanctions could be effective? And could an embargo on Russian oil and gas imports give a push to decarbonisation and the fight to prevent dangerous global warming?