climate envoy John Kerry has told much poorer, lower-emitting African nations, “Mother Nature does not care where those emissions come from.” So why should America not produce the last barrel rather than leaving it for Saudi Arabia or Russia? This argument is most commonly espoused by governments in countries where the opposition eschews climate policy altogether. Yet when it comes to spending money to remove carbon from the atmosphere for no direct benefits, or cutting off existing (and polluting) energy, climate change does resemble a zero-sum game. Self-interest is already driving humans to add low-carbon energy and technologies-some Chinese industrialists want to export electric cars and ensure their country’s supply of foreign oil can’t be choked off, and Texas executives know that they can get rich by building wind turbines. Governments take some climate action regardless of what other countries do or what the treaties say. Political scientists certainly have overstated the extent to which climate change is a collective action problem. Plus, if the oil is going to be pumped anyway, why not ensure that the jobs and revenues stay at home? Or they may be led by hostile dictators who use their oil revenue to fund invasions or repression. Those other countries may have weaker environmental regulations. First, they say, other countries would produce the oil if they didn’t. This also is a reason that coalitions like the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, whose members pledge to phase out fossil fuel production, comprise countries with minimal fossil fuel revenues (such as Denmark or Costa Rica).Ĭlimate-conscious governments typically use two different justifications for approving new oil and gas projects. Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s new leftist government has failed to put into writing its promises about halting new oil development amid fears that it couldn’t replace the lost revenue. Canada and Norway, rich progressive countries with high carbon taxes, continue to approve new oil and gas exploitation. The fossil fuel production side also has a gap between the necessary declines and the actually existing increases in production: twenty of the world’s biggest oil companies are projected to spend $932 billion by the end of 2030 developing new oil and gas fields, and each additional barrel makes the task of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere more daunting.īiden’s failure to restrict the development of domestic fossil fuel resources does not make the United States an outlier. This is the so-called carbon dioxide removal gap. Humans can only rely so much on negative emissions, especially since countries currently have “few firm plans” to scale up these projects fast enough to limit warming to 2 degrees. Nevertheless, oil production must decline in the coming decades in order to hit climate targets. (For context, global production in 2022 was about 100 million barrels a day, a new record.) The idea has always been that some residual oil emissions would be canceled out by negative emissions, such as by capturing carbon dioxide and locking it away underground. Strictly speaking, the task isn’t to get to the last barrel of oil anytime soon: according to one report, the world could produce 40 million barrels of oil a day in 2040 and still be on track to keep warming to 1.5 degrees. Their plans for fossil fuel production also exceed the level that would be compatible with 2 degrees Celsius of warming, the less ambitious target to which they committed themselves in the Paris Agreement. Governments currently plan to produce twice as many fossil fuels in 2030 as would be consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. climate policy, Willow’s approval does reveal much about the global race to pump the “last barrel” of oil. So although it may say little about the direction of U.S. Alaskan legislators suggested they may challenge those “legally dubious” restrictions on future oil extraction, while environmental groups are preparing lawsuits to try to stop the project. Even as the Bureau of Land Management gave Willow the green light, the Department of the Interior said it would restrict future drilling in other parts of Alaska. climate ambitions, and Willow’s story is politically and legally nuanced.
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