The West does not want to move away from fossil fuels. Extraction at pre-pandemic levels

"A new report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) warns that current and future oil and gas extraction permits will generate a total of almost 12 billion tons of CO2 emissions. This is roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of China, the world's most polluting country.

 

According to The Guardian, this year oil and gas extraction has increased to pre-pandemic levels. The largest number of new licenses were issued in the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Norway and Canada, which together account for two-thirds of all licenses issued since 2020.

 

Although criticism for delaying a just energy transformation in the world usually falls on countries such as Saudi Arabia or Russia, whose economies rely heavily on oil and gas, the blame also lies with Western countries that have the resources and technology to support the decarbonization of energy - experts believe.

 

Fossil fuel extraction is growing. Mostly in Western countries

 

The trend of increasing fossil fuel exploration contradicts the findings of scientists who have been warning for years that without moving away from coal, oil and gas, it will not be possible to keep the increase in global temperature at the level set in the Paris Agreement.

 

Climatologists have determined that the richest countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) should move away from coal by 2030, and from oil and gas by 2040, while poorer economies would have until 2040 and 2050 to do so, respectively. Meanwhile, as the IISD analysis shows, it is wealthy countries, with a low economic dependence on fossil fuels, that are leading in issuing the largest number of licenses for the extraction of new deposits. In 2023, they granted 825 licenses, which is a record in the history of the start of registers.

 

As IISD policy advisor Olivier Bois von Kursk said in a press release, the issuance of new oil and gas exploration licenses should be stopped, and wealthy economies with relatively low dependence on fossil fuel revenues should be the first to do so.

 

"Governments must implement the agreement reached at the COP28 climate summit - especially those with the wealth to drive investment in more sustainable sectors," he stressed, adding that it was "deeply worrying" that exploration has increased since the summit ended."