This report reviews the latest scientific evidence and other scholarly literature on the climate implications of new oil and gas extraction projects. The policy implications for the UK are:

• The UK Government’s policy of ending new oil and gas licensing is necessary to align with the Paris goals.

• Fully aligning with the Paris goals also requires the further step of refusing development consents for already-licensed fields such as Rosebank. The report’s findings are directly relevant to the decision the Secretary of State must make regarding the significant effects on the environment of new oil and gas projects for which development consent is sought.

• These policies have the ability to influence actions by other governments, while strengthening the UK’s reputation as a climate leader.

• The best outcome for jobs and the economy is to focus all new energy investments on renewable energies, while production from existing oil and gas fields declines.

The British government has invited input on its vision for the North Sea's clean energy future, including its commitment to end licensing for new oil and gas fields. The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) welcomes the opportunity to respond to the consultation.

At the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 28), governments agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly, and equitable manner. Some governments are implementing this decision with plans to phase out oil and gas production. One of the barriers to phase-out policies is the threat of investor–state arbitration. This report provides policy-makers with tools to mitigate the legal risks of investor–state arbitration when designing oil and gas phase-out policies.

In a landmark decision, the British Supreme Court ruled in Finch v Surrey County Council that planning authorities must assess "downstream" greenhouse gas emissions as part of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process for fossil fuel projects. The case specifically concerned oil extraction at Surrey's Horse Hill site, where planning permission was granted without considering emissions from burning the extracted oil (Scope 3 emissions).

At the COP28 climate summit in Dubai in 2023, governments agreed in the Global Stocktake to “transition away” from fossil fuels in energy systems, “in a just, orderly and equitable manner”. As attention turns to implementing that commitment, an important question is the size of the price-tag.  

In this policy brief, we outline the expenditures incurred in a fossil fuel phaseout, aiming to provide practical input to structuring the way policymakers approach funding a fossil fuel transition. 

The world’s energy markets are going through a profound transformation, driven by the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As global fossil fuel demand decreases, economies that rely on oil and gas exports will face major challenges. 

This briefing aims to provide an introduction to these challenges, and what governments can do to address them. It summarises research by Carbon Tracker, the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), the Civil Society Equity Review, and others.

At the COP 28 climate summit in Dubai, 198 governments agreed to transition away from fossil fuels. That means phasing out oil and gas, as well as coal. Yet most oil and gas producers plan to drill more, not less. Some countries are dependent on revenues from oil and gas, or politically entangled with the industry. An unmanaged transition could get ugly. So how do we deliver a fast, fair, and orderly phase-out?

This document serves to describe the methodology employed in the 2023 report by the Civil Society Equity Review entitled “An Equitable Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Extraction: Towards a Reference Framework for a Fast and Fair Rapid Global Phase Out of Coal, Oil and Gas” (Civil Society Equity Review 2023). Specifically, these methods are used in calculating the equitable phase-out timelines as well as the provision and receipt of financial support to implement these phase-out timelines.

Stopping new oil and gas projects in the UK would send an important signal to other countries, write Gregory Muttitt (UCL Bartlett School of Environment, Energy & Resources), Dr Fergus Green (UCL Political Science) and Dr Steve Pye (UCL Energy Institute) in The Conversation.

At the 28th UN Climate Change Conference (COP 28) in Dubai last year, the world’s governments agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.” But how can this transition be achieved, when fossil fuels are so embedded in people’s everyday lives, in the global economy, and in powerful political interests?

The groundbreaking decision at COP28 calls on parties “to contribute to…transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems.”  Yet, the global production and use of fossil fuels continue to expand, making the goals of the Paris Agreement ever more difficult to achieve. 

This Policy Forum article argues that proponents of ambitious climate action should focus on stopping new fossil fuel projects, encompassing exploration for and development of new fossil fuel extraction sites, and permitting and construction of new, large-scale fossil fuel–consuming infrastructure. Specifically, the article argues that governments should ban new fossil fuel projects, and civil society should advocate such bans. Together, these efforts would help to build a global “No New Fossil” norm. 

This report proposes a framework for equitably phasing out fossil fuel extraction based on five principles:

1. Stop extraction when it violates human rights, 

2. Phase out global extraction at a pace consistent with the 1.5 °C limit, 

3. Enable a just transition for workers and communities, 

4. Reduce extraction fastest in countries least socially dependent on fossil extraction, 

5. Share transition costs fairly, according to capacity to bear those costs.

It specifies phaseout timeframes grounded in shared equity principles and the particular national circumstances of extracting countries, and makes an initial assessment of the nature and scale of the climate finance and international support that can make these timeframes achievable. 

 We identify a set of essential recent advances in climate change research with high policy relevance, across natural and social sciences: (1) looming inevitability and implications of overshooting the 1.5°C warming limit, (2) urgent need for a rapid and managed fossil fuel phase-out, (3) challenges for scaling carbon dioxide removal, (4) uncertainties regarding the future contribution of natural carbon sinks, (5) intertwinedness of the crises of biodiversity loss and climate change, (6) compound events, (7) mountain glacier loss, (8) human immobility in the face of climate risks, (9) adaptation justice, and (10) just transitions in food systems.

This report, an update of our 2021 Beyond Petrostates report, finds that petrostates are facing substantial risks from the energy transition, as falling oil and gas demand is set to put downward pressure on commodity prices and place future government revenues in jeopardy.

While a small handful of countries have reduced their vulnerability, overall the 40 petrostates we analyse are just as vulnerable as in our original analysis and in many ways face growing risks.

This update is driven by two key factors: the growing socio-economic challenges confronting petrostates and the availability of new data reflecting the impact on energy markets from recent geopolitical events. We apply a least-cost methodology used in our previous report to reassess how the energy transition could affect different petrostates.

 As greenhouse gas emissions hit new highs, temperature records tumble and climate impacts intensify, the Emissions Gap Report 2023: Broken Record – Temperatures hit new highs, yet world fails to cut emissions (again) finds that the world is heading for a temperature rise far above the Paris Agreement goals unless countries deliver more than they have promised. 

The report is the 14th edition in a series that brings together many of the world’s top climate scientists to look at future trends in greenhouse gas emissions and provide potential solutions to the challenge of global warming.

Chapter 5 outlines some of the major issues related to global energy transformation, setting the scene for the subsequent chapter on energy transition in low- and middle-income countries.

Concrete analysis of job impacts is needed to inform efforts for a just transition. Now, a study finds that decarbonizing US electricity generation will create jobs, but with uneven distribution among states, industrial sectors and skill needs.

India and China were widely criticised at COP26 in 2021 when they pushed to tone down the language on coal consumption that emerged from the climate summit. As a result of this intervention from two highly coal-dependent nations, with the covert support of other key players, the final version of the Glasgow Climate Pact only called on nations to "phase down" rather than "phase out" unabated coal power.

In IPCC pathways limiting warming to 1.5 °C, global coal power generation declines rapidly due to its emissions intensity and substitutability. However, we find that in countries heavily dependent on coal—China, India and South Africa—this translates to a national decline twice as rapid as that achieved historically for any power technology in any country, relative to system size. This raises questions about socio-political feasibility. 

Here we constrain an integrated assessment model to the Powering Past Coal Alliance’s differentiated phase-out timelines of 2030 in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/European Union and 2050 elsewhere which, for large coal consumers, lies within the range of historical transitions. We find that limiting warming to 1.5 °C then requires CO2 emissions reductions in the global North to be 50% more rapid than if this socio-political reality is ignored. This additional mitigation is focused on Europe and the United States, in transport and industry and implies more rapid decline in global oil and gas production.

This report highlights the implications of 1.5°C scenarios for the phase-out of fossil fuels and the scale-up to renewables, barriers to transitions and solutions to such challenges, and tools for governments and financial institutions to navigate the current energy crisis while maintaining climate ambition. It also looks at the implications of the war in Ukraine for energy systems and explores whether Europe can meet its gas demand without the Russian supply.

This article examines how the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) could impede the implementation of climate pledges, which fossil fuel investors might challenge as violations of their investment protections. 

The Paris climate goals and the Glasgow Climate Pact require anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to decline to net zero by mid-century. This will require overcoming carbon lock-in throughout the energy system. Here we make the first bottom-up assessment of committed CO2 emissions from fossil fuel-producing infrastructure, defined as existing and under-construction oil and gas fields and coal mines. 

 We find that staying within a 1.5 °C carbon budget (50% probability) implies leaving almost 40% of 'developed reserves' of fossil fuels unextracted. The finding that developed reserves substantially exceed the 1.5 °C carbon budget is robust to a Monte Carlo analysis of reserves data limitations, carbon budget uncertainties and oil prices. 

This study contributes to growing scholarship on the relevance of fossil fuel supply to climate mitigation. Going beyond recent warnings by the International Energy Agency, our results suggest that staying below 1.5 °C may require governments and companies not only to cease licensing and development of new fields and mines, but also to prematurely decommission a significant portion of those already developed.

How fast do we need to phase out fossil fuels to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement and safeguard our planet’s future? This question is central to planning effective climate action.

IISD commissioned climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre at The University of Manchester to help answer this question, especially in relation to oil and gas production. Their new report suggests a faster timeline than many governments are planning: an oil and gas production phase-out by 2034 for rich countries, and by 2050 for the poorest.

My expert witness statement in Jeremy Cox et al’s case against the Oil & Gas Authority’s ‘Maximising Economic Recovery’ strategy. It focuses on the low taxes oil companies pay, and the impacts of that for the economy and for climate change.

This report first introduced and quantified the “production gap” in 2019, finding that the world’s governments planned to produce far more fossil fuels than consistent with their Paris Agreement commitment to limit global warming. Two years on, with the climate crisis clearer and more urgent than ever, governments continue to bet on extracting far more coal, oil, and gas than is consistent with agreed climate limits.

Specifically, this report’s production gap analysis —  the first full update since 2019 — finds that the world’s governments still plan to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5°C, and 45% more than consistent with limiting warming to 2°C. Collectively, although many governments have pledged to lower their Figure ES.1 emissions and even set net-zero targets, they have not yet made plans to wind down production of the fossil fuels that, once burned, generate most of those emissions. 

This article argues that allowing new oil and gas projects undermines the UK's credibility as host of the COP26 climate summit and weakens its leadership on climate action. 

National oil companies (NOCs) are key players in the global oil and gas industry—they produce half of the world’s oil and gas, and invest 40% of capital into the sector. But policy-makers and climate activists alike often overlook NOCs’ role in global efforts to address climate change. Omission of NOCs from climate strategies will significantly hamper governments’ attempts to meet global climate goals, and NOCs—along with the countries that depend on their revenues—could be left behind.

 The Step Off the Gas report examines international public finance for natural gas expansion in the Global South and the choices countries face in how to develop their energy systems while meeting socio-economic needs. The report assesses economic and environmental risks from gas development, the status of alternatives to gas, and how to overcome challenges for the South in developing clean energy. It has detailed case studies of gas in three emerging economies: Argentina, Egypt, and India.

This briefing aims to help investors and others interpret and assess the feasibility of the role of CDR in companies’ climate plans. It starts by reviewing some companies’ approaches, to illustrate the issues at stake. It then reviews the technological status of CDR, the uncertainties, risks and limits to CDR deployment, and how much CDR is possible or needed in energy models.

Equity issues have long been debated within international climate politics, focused on fairly distributing reductions in territorial emissions and fossil fuel consumption. There is a growing recognition among scholars and policymakers that curbing fossil fuel supply (as well as demand) can be a valuable part of the climate policy toolbox; this raises the question of where and how the tool should be applied. This paper explores how to equitably manage the social dimensions of a rapid transition away from fossil fuel extraction. 

This paper begins by reviewing how extraction affects economies and communities and the different transitional challenges they face. Based on that review, it then examines three common equity approaches – economic efficiency, meeting development needs, and effort-sharing. 

This chapter  in the Handbook of OPEC and the Global Energy Order examines the past, present and possible futures of OPEC's engagement with the issue of climate change. 

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), celebrating its 60th anniversary in 2020, is one of the most recognizable acronyms in international politics. The organization has undergone decades of changing importance, from political irrelevance to the spotlight of world attention and back; and from economic boom for its members to deep political and financial crisis.

This handbook, with chapters provided by scholars and analysts from different backgrounds and specializations, discusses and analyzes the history and development of OPEC, its global importance, and the role it has played, and still plays, in the global energy market.

This blog, summarising my chapter published in a book on OPEC, argues that we need to think about OPEC less simplistically, and suggests a role for OPEC in tackling climate change by restricting its supply of oil.

This new report reveals, for the first time, the climate impact of North Sea oil and gas extraction, and shows the way to a job-creating energy transition. To deal with the climate emergency, the UK needs to immediately stop approving new oil and gas drilling and redirect support to clean jobs and renewable energy.

My written evidence to the UK Environmental Audit Committee’s hearing into UK Export Finance (UKEF). It recommends that UKEF end its financing of long-lived fossil fuel projects. You can watch video of my oral evidence here. 

This blog critiques Shell’s climate plan, which would actually lead to increasing emissions, because the company’s targets for reducing carbon intensity are outweighed by its plans to increase the amount it produces.

This speech I gave at a conference in Mozambique remembers three heroes who stood up to the oil industry: Ida Tarbell, Mohammed Mosaddegh and Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Carbon emissions—and hence fossil fuel combustion—must decline rapidly if warming is to be held below 1.5 or 2 °C. Yet fossil fuels are so deeply entrenched in the broader economy that a rapid transition poses the challenge of significant transitional disruption. 

The principles and framework laid out here are offered as a contribution to understanding the nature of the potential impacts of a transition, principles for equitably sharing the costs of avoiding them, and guidance for prioritizing which fossil resources can still be extracted.

This article revisits the debates on the oil motive for the Iraq War. It examines US/UK strategic objectives, how the governments planned to achieve them and how they decided to talk about them in public. 

This blog critiques Shell’s Energy Transition Plan, and argues that to align with the Paris goals, Shell should stop opening new oil and gas fields.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is the world’s most influential source of energy information. Its stated aim is to support decisions in governments and in the private sector, “to ensure reliable, affordable and clean energy.”

To achieve this, it must advise governments and others on how to address the biggest energy challenge of the twenty-first century: preventing dangerous climate change. All 30 of the IEA’s member countries have signed the Paris Agreement, committing to keeping warming well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and pursuing efforts to keep it to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

However, in this report we find that the IEA is holding governments back from achieving those goals. The IEA’s roadmap “New Policies Scenario” (NPS), the foremost guide to decisions on energy policies and investments, steers those decisions towards levels of fossil fuel use that would cause severe climate change

This blog critiques Shell’s new ‘Sky’ scenario and laments the demise of Shell’s once world-leading scenarios team.

My opening statement, presented at the Irish parliament’s inquiry into the proposed Petroleum Bill. It makes the case that meeting Ireland’s climate goals requires ending the licensing of new oil and gas fields, critiques the idea of gas as a ‘transition fuel’ and shows why restricting fossil fuel supply is an effective policy.  Video of oral evidence here (34:30).

This blog critiques the International Energy Agency’s Sustainable Development Scenario, and calls on the IEA to publish a truly Paris-aligned scenario instead.

Companies like ExxonMobil, Shell and BP routinely use their in-house energy forecasts to justify investments in multi-decade, high-cost projects, from the Arctic to the tar sands. While the companies present their published forecasts as objective analyses, the forecasts rather reflect the future they want us to believe in. This report:

• reveals the poor track record of oil company forecasting;

• exposes the unlikely assumptions built into the forecasts; and

• examines the consequences of these forecasts for investments and for climate change. 

It finds that the companies are highly vulnerable to disruption by clean energy technologies, and that their forecasts are playing an unhelpful role in the climate debate. The report includes a comparative analysis of the oil majors’ current approaches to thinking about energy futures, and recommendations for more robust ways to think about the future of energy, echoing the recent Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures.

This briefing assesses how decarbonisation of the energy system will affect the valuation of Saudi Aramco in its Initial Public Offering. 

It examines the climate dimensions of the proposed IPO through three lenses: how oil price will affect Aramco’s valuation, how Aramco’s oil production will compete with that of international oil companies in light of constrained demand, and how Aramco’s reserves relate to carbon budgets. 

While the circumstances for rapid expansion of the tar sands were favourable for the industry over the past two decades, there are clear signs that pro-expansion conditions such as unfettered market access, stable high oil prices, political and public support, growing U.S. demand and minimal regulatory constraints have shifted.

Since 2014, 42 tar sands projects have been put on-hold, delayed, or cancelled. The matrix of risks that have stalled the predicted unchecked growth of the tar sands combine to suggest structural rather than cyclical changes in the oil industry and represent a significant setback to the oil companies’ frontier driven growth model.

This article assesses the potential legality of the UK's pursuit of economic change in Iraq, especially in relation to oil. 

A new study released by Oil Change International, in partnership with 14 organizations from around the world, scientifically grounds the growing movement to keep carbon in the ground by revealing the need to stop all new fossil fuel infrastructure and industry expansion.

This article asks why the Chilcot Report into the UK's role in the Iraq War did not pay more attention to oil issues. 

In this report , OCI deploys the oil industry’s own forecasting and modeling tools together with a detailed examination of the Northwest facilities’ configurations. Key findings in the report concern:

• Propping up Canadian tar sands: In the absence of new pipelines, Northwest rail terminals would be the sole driver of new growth in Canadian tar sands oil.

• Multiplying oil extraction and climate pollution: Oil train facilities in the Northwest could unlock as much as 382,000 barrels per day of new tar sands production that would otherwise not be extracted. The resulting greenhouse gas pollution from extra tar sands production could be as much as 106 million metric tons per year of carbon dioxide—the equivalent of doubling the total greenhouse gas pollution of Washington state.

• Feeding the Bakken beast: Northwest oil train terminals could also lead to more oil drilling in the Bakken formation, as much as 114,000 barrels per day beyond what would be produced without the terminals. The resulting greenhouse gas pollution from this extra production could be as much as 30 million tons per year of carbon dioxide—the equivalent of doubling the number of cars on the road in Oregon and Washington.

This article discusses US oil objectives in Iraq, the extent to which they were achieved, the present status and what might come next. 

My expert witness statement in Friends of the Earth’s legal case against UK Export Finance support for Total’s Mozambique LNG project. It focuses on how to assess climate impact of a fossil fuel project, and the role of gas in the energy transition.

Drawing on thousands of unreleased government documents and dozens of interviews with key Iraq and foreign players, this book tells the story of the struggles over the future of oil during the occupation of Iraq. 

You can read more about the book here.

This commentary summarises and discusses my report revealing how BP and the Iraqi government secretly renegotiated the contract for the Rumaila field, after an apparently transparent auction, and how this skewed the benefits in favour of BP.

This report reveals how BP and the Iraqi government secretly renegotiated the contract for the Rumaila field, after an apparently transparent auction, and how this skewed the benefits in favour of BP.

This report analyses the the Kashagan oilfield in Kazakhstan, asking whether the country is getting a fair deal from the oil companies.

Multilateral negotiations are stalling. Unable to get what they want, corporations are now relying on bilateral and regional treaties to push their investment interests. They are using Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) to challenge national and local laws, taxes and other government actions, or to push through new obligations such as more intellectual property rights.

Some companies are using existing or specially-negotiated BITs to get more out of concession agreements. Under the umbrella of BITs, companies are imposing Host Government Agreements (HGAs) that dictate the legal framework under which a company's proposed project, such a dam or an oil pipeline, will operate. The Agreements give effective control to a company over national legislation and regulations that apply to their activities -- and require the country to compensate the corporation if it enacts any new law that affects corporate profits.

This article describes and illustrates how corporations are imposing a new era of resource colonialism by means of these agreements with examples from the former Soviet Union, West Africa and Iraq.

Author: Greg Muttitt

Published by:  Arab Studies Quarterly (28:3/4, 1-17_

Control of Iraq’s future oil wealth is being handed to multinational oil companies through long-term contracts that will cost Iraq hundreds of billions of dollars, according to this report from PLATFORM, published with nef and War on Want in the UK.

Crude Designs reveals that current Iraqi oil policy will allocate the development of at least 64% of Iraq’s reserves to foreign oil companies.

The article reports on the achievements of the new oilworkers' trade union in occupied Iraq.

A book characterising what could be expected from BP’s proposed Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey pipelines system, based on the experience of BP projects in the UK, US and Colombia.