paris agreement

What climate targets? Top fossil fuel producing nations keep boosting output

climate change, fossil fuels, paris agreement, Science, syndication / Beth Washington / September 22, 2025

Top producers are planning to mine and drill even more of the fuels in 2030.

Machinery transfers coal at a port in China’s Chongqing municipality on April 20. Credit: STR/AFP via Getty Images

The last two years have witnessed the hottest one in history, some of the worst wildfire seasons across Canada, Europe and South America and deadly flooding and heat waves throughout the globe. Over that same period, the world’s largest fossil fuel producers have expanded their planned output for the future, setting humanity on an even more dangerous path into a warmer climate.

Governments now expect to produce more than twice as much coal, oil and gas in 2030 as would be consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement, according to a report released Monday. That level is slightly higher than what it was in 2023, the last time the biennial Production Gap report was published.

The increase is driven by a slower projected phaseout of coal and higher outlook for gas production by some of the top producers, including China and the United States.

“The Production Gap Report has long served as a mirror held up to the world, revealing the stark gap between fossil fuel production plans and international climate goals,” said Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in a foreword to the report. “This year’s findings are especially alarming. Despite record climate impacts, a winning economic case for renewables, and strong societal appetite for action, governments continue to expand fossil fuel production beyond what the climate can withstand.”

The peer-reviewed report, written by researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute, Climate Analytics and the International Institute for Sustainable Development, aims to focus attention on the supply side of the climate equation and the government policies that encourage or steer fossil fuel production.

“Governments have such a significant role in setting up the rules of the game,” said Neil Grant, a senior expert at Climate Analytics and one of the authors, in a briefing for reporters. “What this report shows is most governments are not using that influence for good.”

Chart showing growth in fossil fuel production — Credit: Inside Climate News

The report’s blaring message is that these subsidies, tax incentives, permitting and other policies have largely failed to adapt to the climate targets nations have adopted. The result is a split screen. Governments say they will cut their own climate-warming pollution, yet they plan to continue producing the fossil fuels that are driving that pollution far beyond what their climate targets would allow.

The report singles out the United States as “the starkest case of a country recommitting to fossil fuels.” The data for the United States, which draws on the latest projections of the US Energy Information Administration, does not reflect most of the policies the Trump administration and Congress have put in place this year to promote fossil fuels.

Since January, Congress has enacted billions of dollars in new subsidies to oil and gas companies while the Trump administration has forced retiring coal plants to continue operating, expanded mining and drilling access on public lands, delayed deadlines for drillers to comply with limits on methane pollution and fast-tracked fossil fuel permitting while setting roadblocks for building wind and solar energy projects.

In response to the report, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in an email, “As promised, President Trump ended Joe Biden’s war on American energy and unleashed American energy on day one in the best interest of our country’s economic and national security. He will continue to restore American’s energy dominance.”

Chart showing planned fuel production — Credit: Inside Climate News

The Production Gap report assessed the government plans or projections of 20 of the world’s top producers. Some have state-owned enterprises while others are dominated by publicly listed companies. The countries, which were chosen for their production levels, availability of data and presence of clear climate targets, account for more than 80 percent of fossil fuel output. The report models total global production by scaling the data up to account for the rest.

All but three of the 20 nations are planning or projecting increased production in 2030 of at least one fossil fuel. Eleven now project higher production of at least one fuel in 2030 than they did two years ago.

Expected global output of coal, oil, and gas for 2030 is now 120 percent more than what would be consistent with pathways to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and 77 percent higher than scenarios to keep warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The greater the warming, the more severe the consequences will be on extreme weather, rising seas and other impacts.

While previous installments of the report were published under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Program, this year’s version was issued independently.

In a sign of the world’s continuing failure to limit fossil fuel use, the modeling scenarios the report uses are becoming obsolete. Because nations have continued to burn more coal, gas and oil every year, future cuts would now need to be even steeper than what is reflected in the report to keep climate targets within reach.

“We’re already going into sort of the red and burning up our debt,” Grant said.

Three nations alone—China, the United States and Russia—were responsible for more than half of “extraction-based” emissions in 2022, or the pollution that comes when the fossil fuels are burned.

Ira Joseph, a senior research associate at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, who was not involved in the report, said its focus on supply highlights an important part of understanding global energy markets.

“Any type of tax breaks or subsidies or however you want to call them lowers the break-even cost for producing oil and gas,” Joseph said. Lower costs mean more supply, which in turn lowers prices and spurs more demand. The projections and plans the report is based on, Joseph said, reflect this global give and take.

Chart showing fossil fuel increase by country — Credit: Inside Climate News

The biggest changes since the last report come from a slower projected decline in China’s coal mining and faster expected growth in gas production in the United States. Smaller producers are also expecting sharper increases in gas output.

The report did highlight some bright spots. Two additional governments—Brazil and Colombia—are developing plans that would align fossil fuel production with climate goals, bringing the total to six out of the 20. Germany now expects a more accelerated phase-out of coal production. China is speeding its deployment of wind and solar energy. Some countries have also reduced subsidies for fossil fuels.

Yet these measures clearly fall far short, the report said.

The authors called on governments to coordinate their policies and plan for how they can collectively lower production in a way that keeps climate targets within reach without shocking the economies that depend on the jobs and revenue provided by mining, drilling, and processing the fuels. They pointed to a handful of efforts—called Just Energy Transition Partnerships—to provide financing from wealthy countries to support phasing out coal in developing or emerging economies. These programs have struggled to mobilize much money, however, and the Trump administration has withdrawn the United States from them.

Grant said the policies indicate that government officials are failing to adapt to a more uncertain future.

“Change doesn’t happen in straight lines, but I think if you look at the Production Gap report this year, what you see is that many governments are still thinking in straight lines,” Grant said.

The policies the team examined foresee fossil fuel use remaining steady or declining gradually. The result, Grant argued, could be one of two scenarios: Either fossil fuel use remains high for years, in line with these production plans, or it declines more quickly and governments are unprepared for the sudden drop in sales.

“Those would lead to either climate chaos or significant negative economic impacts on countries,” Grant said. “So we need to try to avoid both of those. And the way to do that is to try to align our fossil fuel production plans with our climate goals.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Paris Agreement target won’t protect polar ice sheets, scientists warn

paris agreement, Science, syndication / 9u50fv / May 21, 2025

“I think we’ve known for a long time that we’re interfering with the climate system in a very dangerous way,” he said. “And one of the points of our paper is to demonstrate that one part of the climate system, the ice sheets, are showing some very disturbing signals right now.”

Some of the most vulnerable places are far from any melting ice sheets, including Belize City, home to about 65,000 people, where just 3 feet of sea level rise would swamp 500 square miles of land.

In some low-lying tropical regions around the equator, sea level is rising three times as fast as the global average. That’s because the water is expanding as it warms, and as the ice sheets melt, their gravitational pull is reduced, allowing more water to flow away from the poles toward the equator.

“At low latitudes, it goes up more than the average,” Bamber said. “It’s bad news for places like Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, and the Nile Delta.”

Global policymakers need to be more aware of the effects of a 1.5° C temperature increase, Ambassador Carlos Fuller, long-time climate negotiator for Belize, said of the new study.

Belize already moved its capital inland, but its largest city will be inundated at just 1 meter of sea-level rise, he said.

“Findings such as these only sharpen the need to remain within the 1.5° Paris Agreement limit, or as close as possible, so we can return to lower temperatures and protect our coastal cities,” Fuller said.

While the new study is focused on ice sheets, Durham University’s Stokes notes that recent research shows other parts of the Earth system are already at, or very near, tipping points that are irreversible on a timescale relevant to human civilizations. That includes changes to freshwater systems and ocean acidification.

“I think somebody used the analogy that it’s like you’re wandering around in a dark room,” he said. “You know there’s a monster there, but you don’t know when you’re going to encounter it. It’s a little bit like that with these tipping points. We don’t know exactly where they are. We may have even crossed them, and we do know that we will hit them if we keep warming.”

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With four more years like 2023, carbon emissions will blow past 1.5° limit

climate change, emissions limits, global warming, paris agreement, Policy, Renewable power, Science / DJ Henderson / October 24, 2024

One way to look at how problematic this is would be to think in terms of a carbon budget. We can estimate how much carbon can be put into the atmosphere before warming reaches 1.5° C. Subtract the emissions we’ve already added, and you get the remaining budget. At this point, the remaining budget for 1.5° C is only 200 Gigatonnes, which means another four years like 2023 will leave us well beyond our budget. For the 2° C budget, we’ve got less than 20 years like 2023 before we go past.

An alternate way to look at the challenge is to consider the emissions reductions that would get us on track. UNEP uses 2019 emissions as a baseline (about 52 Gigatonnes) and determined that, in 2030, we’d need to have emissions cut by 28 percent to get onto the 2° C target, and by 42 percent to be on track for the 1.5° C target.

The NDCs are nowhere close to that, with even the conditional pledges being sufficient to only cut emissions by 10 percent. Ideally, that should be prompting participating nations to be rapidly updating their NDCs to get them better aligned with our stated goals. And, while 90 percent have done so since the signing of the Paris Agreement, only a single country has made updated pledges over the past year.

Countries are also failing to keep their national policies in line with their NDCs. The UNEP report estimates that current policies allow the world collectively to emit two Gigatonnes more than their pledges would see being released.

A limited number of countries are responsible for the huge gap between where we need to go and what we’re actually doing. Nearly two-thirds of 2023’s emissions come from just six countries: China, the US, India, the EU, Russia, and Brazil. By contrast, the 55 nations of the African Union are only producing about 6 percent of the global emissions. Obviously, this means that any actions taken by these six entities will have a disproportionate effect on future emissions. The good news is that at least two of those, the EU and US, saw emissions drop over the year prior (by 7.5 percent in the EU, and 1.4 percent in the US), while Brazil remained largely unchanged.

With four more years like 2023, carbon emissions will blow past 1.5° limit Read More »

OPEC members keep climate accords from acknowledging reality

carbon emissions, climate change, COP28, fossil fuels, paris agreement, Policy, Science, UN / DJ Henderson / December 11, 2023

Avoiding the truth —

COP28 agreement draft no longer includes calls to phase out fossil fuels.

John Timmer – Dec 11, 2023 7: 34 pm UTC

Image of a person standing in front of a doorway with — Enlarge / Saudi Arabia’s presence at COP28 has reportedly been used to limit progress on fossil fuel cutbacks.

Oil-producing countries are apparently succeeding in their attempts to eliminate language from an international climate agreement that calls for countries to phase out the use of fossil fuels. Draft forms of the agreement had included text that called upon the countries that are part of the Paris Agreement to work toward “an orderly and just phase out of fossil fuels.” Reports now indicate that this text has gone missing from the latest versions of the draft.

The agreement is being negotiated at the United Nations’ COP28 climate change conference, taking place in the United Arab Emirates. The COP, or Conference of the Parties, meetings are annual events that attempt to bring together UN members to discuss ways to deal with climate change. They were central to the negotiations that brought about the Paris Agreement, which calls for participants to develop plans that should bring the world to net-zero emissions by the middle of the century.

Initial plans submitted by countries would lower the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, but not by nearly enough to reach net zero. However, the agreement included mechanisms by which countries would continue to evaluate their progress and submit more stringent goals. So, additional COP meetings have included what’s termed a “stocktake” to evaluate where countries stand, and statements are issued to encourage and direct future actions.

The language of that statement needs to be agreed upon by every party and is invariably contentious. This year’s statement has been especially difficult, as early drafts (such as this one) included the potential to call for parties to stop using fossil fuels, along with a separate, vague alternative:

Option 1: An orderly and just phase out of fossil fuels;

Option 2: Accelerating efforts toward phasing out unabated fossil fuels and to rapidly reducing their use so as to achieve net zero CO₂ in energy systems by or around mid-century;

Option 3: No text.

The “unabated” language in the alternative is widely interpreted as referring to abatement via the use of large-scale carbon capture to offset the emissions from continued fossil fuel use.

While we know that carbon capture can work, it has not been tried at large scales, much less on anything close to the scales needed to offset continued fossil fuel use. Critical details like the capacity and stability of different storage options haven’t been worked out, nor has the very tricky question of who will be paying to operate all the infrastructure that would be required for it to work.

As a result, carbon capture is not generally considered a viable option for offsetting anything more than a few difficult-to-decarbonize use cases, such as international shipping. Which why most countries and NGOs are supporting the UN’s secretary-general, who promoted the alternate language calling for a phase-out of fossil fuels.

Most, but not all. One notable NGO, OPEC, directly called on its members to reject any language that targeted fossil fuels. And a prominent OPEC member, Saudia Arabia, appears to have been trying to block any deals that would include that language, in part by bogging down all negotiations at COP28. Matters weren’t helped when a video surfaced that showed the conference’s host, Sultan Al Jaber, saying that there was “no science” behind calls to phase out fossil fuels, although he quickly disavowed that position.

The loss of Option 1 from the latest drafts is a sign that oil-producing nations have succeeded. Which in turn indicates that they have no intention of slowing production even as indications of continued warming and its consequences have grown ever more dramatic. It will also provide cover for many other countries that may be looking for excuses to act.

That said, the same draft includes several actions that do not have any alternative language and call for countries to take significant actions:

Triple renewable energy capacity by 2030.
Double the annual rate of energy efficiency improvements.
Immediately stop issuing permits for coal plants that do not include carbon capture and rapidly phase out any existing plants of this sort.
Rapidly phase in zero-emissions vehicles.
Eliminate fossil fuel subsidies.

Negotiations are ongoing, and that draft is nearly a week old, but it may indicate that some positive things could be accomplished while everyone is distracted by arguments over the phase-out of fossil fuels.

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