Put Up or Shut Up

It’s go time for the fossil fuel industries to get real about their climate emissions. It doesn’t sound like they’re getting the memo.

Mar 17, 2024

The latest daunting data on global methane pollution hit the news wires this week. Trust some of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies to choose such a notably bad moment to throw more fuel on the fire. Literally.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported Wednesday that methane emissions were stuck near record levels in 2023, with 120 million tonnes of the stuff tracing back to fossil fuel burning. So cue three of the world’s biggest fossil companies with announcements that their greenhouse gas emissions are still rising (BP), they plan to unilaterally “retire” their long-term climate plans (Shell) and, really, we consumers have only ourselves to blame for the devastating global emergency the fossil industries have brought to our doorsteps (ExxonMobil).

The IEA’s latest data landed just as the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that the last nine months of off-the-charts heat records have brought the Earth into “unknown territory”. The month-by-month temperature rise “really was much quicker than we all anticipated,” said IPCC Chair Jim Skea. And with El Niño factoring into the numbers, “there’s more science needed to actually understand why 2023 was such a distinctive year.”

You might think that level of uncertainty from the world’s leading climate science agency would pull big polluters in the direction of the precautionary principle, itself one of the best bits of common sense that environmental science has ever come up with. If only. Instead, some of the world’s biggest fossil companies are trampling their own prior climate promises, lukewarm as they were to begin with.

No, unfortunately, this isn’t our April Fools’ Day special (coming soon). Sometimes in this line of work, the satire just writes itself.

A Long Road Ahead

In the latest edition of its annual Global Methane Tracker, the IEA points to the steep hill fossil companies will have to climb to get their emissions in line with anything resembling a realistic climate target.

“A 75% cut in methane emissions from fossil fuels by 2030 is imperative to stop the planet from warming to a dangerous level,” Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a release. But even the ambitious promises we heard at last year’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates would only be sufficient to reduce methane pollution by about 50%. “In most cases,” the IEA writes, “these pledges are not yet backed up by detailed plans, policies, and regulations.”

The tracker also pinpoints the primary cause of the problem: Oil and gas accounted for 79 megatonnes of methane emissions last year, followed by coal at 37 Mt. Traditional uses of biomass added another 10 Mt.

Those numbers matter because fast, deep methane reductions are widely recognized as one of our best chances to hit an ambitious climate target by the end of this decade. Methane, you’ll recall, is a shorter-lived greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but it carries about 84 times more warming potential over the crucial 20-year span when humanity will be scrambling to get climate change under control.

In its report this week, the IEA says methane is responsible for about 30% of the rise in global temperatures since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and the top 10 polluting countries—all of them major oil and gas producers—accounted for 80 million tonnes in 2023, or two-thirds of the global total.

This is one top 10 list where no one should ever want to appear. But Canada’s oil and gas sector, ever striving, ever achieving, fought its way to a tie for sixth place.

Methane is the primary component of natural gas. That’s why scientists, civil society, and some governments have been so anxious to track the massive, unmeasured, unacknowledged methane releases from fossil fuel infrastructure of all kinds, from fracking fields in British Columbia, Alberta, and the United States, to oilfields and liquefied natural gas terminals, to pipelines and coal mines.

Government and independent agencies are even launching satellites to verify numbers the industry shows little inclination to get right. It’s also one of the reasons that many climate hawks want to see “natural” gas rebranded as “fossil” gas. (I have my worries about how that might turn out, but that’s another Weekender for another day.)

From Hope to Urgency

As the IEA points out, the storyline was different at COP28, where leading emitters including Canada committed to deep methane reduction targets this decade. One of the big news items over those two weeks was that 50 of the world’s biggest fossil producers had signed on to an Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter, promising to essentially phase out methane emissions and end routine gas flaring by 2030.

At a media briefing on the first Saturday of the conference, COP28 officials were almost giddy with their sense of accomplishment. “What we’ve achieved so far is that 50 very significant oil and gas signatories have joined,” said Kenyan diplomat Adnan Amin, former director general of the International Renewable Energy Agency. “That in itself is highly significant.” COP28 president Sultan Al-Jaber called the announcement “an inflection point for addressing various challenges that to date have slowed down the energy transition.”

Perhaps the most powerful moment in that media event came from Fred Krupp, president of the U.S. Environmental Defense Fund. He called the cluster of deals and promises at the beginning of the COP, including the methane deal, “the most impactful day of announcements” in nearly 30 years of UN climate negotiations. “This new initiative, if, if, the commitments are met, has the potential to reduce methane emissions by each of the companies signing up by an average of 80-90%,” he told media.

Krupp recalled a private meeting in late September where Al Jaber, who famously assumed the COP Presidency while serving as CEO of the UAE’s state oil company, had convened his industry peers. As we reported at the time:

Looking ahead to the COP, “he said this could be the companies’ last chance to demonstrate that they could step up and do what needed to be done, to at least take a big step,” Krupp recounted. “He talked about methane as an element of these reductions,” and “at the end of this talk he said, ‘I need you. I need your support. I need you to sign up. Are you with me? Are you in or are you out?’”
The room was “entirely silent,” Krupp said. “The hair was standing up on the back of my neck.” Then at the end of the day, after several hours of side meetings, Krupp said he had a chance to ask Al Jaber how the industry executives had responded. “He picked up his phone and he pointed it at me and he said, ‘Fred, my phone has been lighting up all day. They’re telling me they are in.’”

But that was more than three months ago. Now we’re into the phase in the COP’s annual cycle when the world’s biggest climate polluters start grinding all the grand pronouncements down into the smallest possible steps forward. On that, if nothing else, the fossil industry delivers consistently and near-flawlessly.

Apparently Not a ‘No-Brainer’

To listen to their PR messaging or follow their endless stream of feel-good advertising, you’d think the fossil fuel industry was all set to step up on a problem that should be a “no-brainer” for them to solve. But in the week bracketing the IEA methane report, they were all walking back climate commitments that already fell short of the emissions reductions that stand as an essential global target for 2030.

• On March 8, BP announced that its climate pollution rose in 2023 for the first time in four years, as new oil and gas projects came online and production levels increased. Its methane emissions grew 10%, from 28,000 to 31,000 tonnes. Reuters said BP still reduced its climate pollution over the period beginning in 2019. But the company must surely have chosen that baseline year to fully factor in the crash in economic activity brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Less than a week later, Shell’s latest “energy transition” strategy showed the company watering down its 2030 emissions target and opting to “retire” its 2035 goal. “Shell attributes these changes to a shift in its business priorities,” Carbon Brief reported, aiming to sell more renewable power while still increasing its investment in new oil and gas fields.

• And ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods stood accused of “gaslighting” the public with his claim that citizens, not fossil fuel companies, are responsible for the climate emergency. “It’s like a drug lord blaming everyone but himself for drug problems,” retorted Columbia Business School climate economist Gernot Wagner. “Exxon is at the mercy of markets but they are also shaping them, they are shaping policy,” he added. “So no, you can’t blame the public for the failure to fix climate change.”

Closer to home in Canada, we have Calgary-based Cenovus Energy planning to increase its oilsands extraction 19% over the next five years, while leading the charge for more lavish taxpayer subsidies to fund its continuing, precarious adventures in carbon capture and storage. In Ontario, the provincial government is working to roll back an independent regulator’s decision to stop favouring methane-intensive gas hook-ups in new homes over electric heat pumps, leaving gas giant Enbridge Inc. predictably unfazed by the business risk it faces in a climate emergency.

Or would face, if it had to compete head-on with lower-emitting alternatives that actually cost us all less for heating and cooling. (See the chart just below this article.)

So What About It?

The missing piece in this yarn is where to take it next.

It’s obvious that fossil fuel companies hold the levers that can deliver the fastest, deepest methane reductions. To understand that they have no intention of getting it done, there’s no need to read their minds. We just have to read their lips.

What to do about that is one of the most commonly-asked questions I hear, and it’s tougher to answer than it might seem.

We all have different opportunities and access points, different steps we can try to take, different time and skills and availability to volunteer and work with others. So there’s no one “right” answer for everyone.

But whether you join or donate to a group to take on fossil industry expansion head on, try to change the local bylaws and structures that drive energy use and emissions, join a lawsuit on fossil fuel production or advertising, launch a climate education program in your school or community centre, or work to change out the energy systems in your house, co-op, apartment building, or neighbourhood…there are a few common denominators.

• Put the responsibility where it lies, with institutions and structures, rather than following Exxon’s lead and heaping blame on individuals.

• Build bridges wherever you can. Look for allies outside the climate “bubble”, and try hard to err on the side of having too many allies and not enough adversaries.

• Recognize those allies when you see them, even if the alignment isn’t perfect. In Canada, climate messaging still tends to focus primarily on Ottawa, while mostly extending a free pass to the provincial governments that hold all the constitutional authority for natural resource development. If we keep it up, we’ll end up helping to unelect a federal government that is obviously flawed from a climate standpoint, and replacing it with one that would be openly hostile to anything that carried the slightest whiff of emission reductions or energy transition. You don’t need to be partisan for one party or the other (we certainly aren’t) to relentlessly seek out the best deal for climate policy.

• Celebrate the wins, even if they’re small. Then keep on pushing for the next one, and the next.

The good news is that you can make a difference wherever energy is produced or consumed, as long as you pick the battle where you can have the greatest impact. The IEA says methane reductions are right around the corner, and it will be great if next year’s results prove them right. But either way, there’s lots we can do to help make it happen.

Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix, The Energy Mix Weekender, and our weekly feature digests, Cities & Communities and Heat & Power.