Ten years ago, the world's nations agreed to limit “global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels” in the Paris Agreement. And at COP28 in 2023, nations agreed to “keep 1.5 °C within reach”.
But according to a report by the Stockholm Environment Institute, governments around the world are collectively planning to more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent in keeping global temperatures to 1.5 °C — putting our global climate ambitions at risk.
“Taken together, government now plan even higher levels of coal production to 2035, and gas production to 2050, than they did in 2023. Planned oil production continues to increase to 2050. These plans undermine countries’ Paris Agreement commitments, and go against expectations that under current policies global demand for coal, oil, and gas will peak before 2030.”
Most of the countries analysed in the report are continuing to plan fossil fuel production at levels inconsistent with their stated net-zero climate ambitions. In fact, the report warns that most major fossil-fuel-producing countries have yet to even embrace policies for deliberately phasing out fossil fuels and ensuring a real energy transition to low-carbon energy sources.
Furthermore, while many governments have continued to promote gas as a so-called “transition fuel”, they have largely failed to plan a future transition away from it. And even worse, the report details how all the countries continue to provide substantial fossil fuel subsides and that the cost of government support for fossil fuels remains at an all-time high.
The report shows the complete disregard by our governments to keep global temperatures in line with internationally agreed treaties on climate change. Just this past summer, the ICJ ruled that 1.5 °C is the primary temperature goal that the world's governments have agreed to target — and that government's insufficient climate action violate international law. Clearly, policymakers around the world will do well in remembering that.
This collective failure to curb fossil fuel production and to limit greenhouse gas emissions means that future emission reductions will need to be even steeper and even more radical to compensate. And that could mean that our governments instead could face serious political and social unrest from populations that are unhappy with sudden and drastic emission reduction policies and actions.
