No New Fossil Fuels

April 2022: a Scientists for Extinction Rebellion action outside the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

At the launch of the third Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, in New York on 4th April 2022, the UN Secretary General gave a stark warning:

"Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness... the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels" - additional commentary

Later that month a group of desperate scientists stuck scientific papers (and themselves) to the front of the UK Government's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. They had a simple and science-led demand: Stop all NEW fossil fuel investment & development. These are the papers they stuck ...

  • Welsby et al 2021: "to allow for a 50 per cent probability of limiting warming to 1.5 °C. By 2050, we find that nearly 60 per cent of oil and fossil methane gas, and 90 per cent of coal must remain unextracted to keep within a 1.5 °C carbon budget" - additional commentary

  • Tong et al 2019: "little or no new CO2-emitting infrastructure can be commissioned, and that existing infrastructure may need to be retired early (or be retrofitted with CCS technology) in order to meet the Paris Agreement climate goals" - additional commentary

  • UN Environment Programme - Production Gap 2021: "the world’s governments plan to produce more than twice the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C" - additional commentary

  • McGlade & Ekins 2015: "Our results show that policy makers’ instincts to exploit rapidly and completely their territorial fossil fuels are, in aggregate, inconsistent with their commitments to this temperature limit" - press release

  • Hansen et al 2013: "Continuation of high fossil fuel emissions, given current knowledge of the consequences, would be an act of extraordinary witting intergenerational injustice." - additional commentary

  • Fatih Birol 2021, Director of the International Energy Agency: “If governments are serious about the #ClimateCrisis, there can be no new investments in oil, gas and coal, from now” - additional commentary

 

The banner image represents Global Bio Stripes: https://findingnature.org.uk/ - Data: LPI 2022. Living Planet Index https://stats.livingplanetindex.org/