From Ray Wills
World 1.5MBPD oil displaced by EVs in 2024 China in 2025 Oil market not about the 100 mbpd we use, but the 1-2 mbpd YOY change Oil markets break on variations > 1-2MBPD [Highly inelastic demand] China's vehicle fleet electrification has just removed 250ML/day of China's demand - or >1.5MBPD
#Iran war highlights how #oil has become the Achilles Heel of the global #economy. EVs have already avoided equivalent of 70 pct of Iran's exports, and could do more.
From Claes de Vreese
And now something positive:
Solar and wind energy production in the EU surpasses fossil energy for the first time.
Source: https://dr.dk
Despite big oil, despite Trump, despite the Right's betrayal of ordinary people: we are doing it. Too slowly, certainly, but the trend is in the right direction, on renewables, on EVs, and on heat pumps.
Victory is possible.
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| Image by Sujalparab via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) |
From East Anglia Bylines
Author Kurt Vonnegut described this as one of his shapes of story. Of Cinderella, the most popular story ever and translated into 700 languages, he said: “People love that story.”
It’s Rags to Riches. We all recognise this shape of story in our own hopes.
Now we’re all in a climate and nature hole.
The physics of heat are relentless. Rising seas, more moisture in the air, droughts then heavier rain, stronger wind and storm, melting glaciers. The cause is simple. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases capturing heat in the atmosphere. The source is clear too. It’s fossil fuels. Coal, oil, gas.
This much is known. The hole is hot and the future dark.
So it seems.
The 30th COP (United Nations Conference of the Parties) has just concluded in the Amazonian city of Belém. COPs are good. They bring people together. They bring along activists and thinkers and academics and citizens’ groups. People meet, talk, share. Little advances happen.
But there are two problems
Groups of countries can easily be blockers. Key text disappears from the declaration as everyone tries to get to at least some kind of agreement. In the COP30 agreement, there’s no mention of fossil fuels. Blockers won.
Second, even when a declaration emerges at a time of common purpose and gentle politics, such as in Paris 2015, it still needs to be implemented.
We all hoped the Paris agreement would hold global temperatures to below +1.5°C (above pre-industrial baseline). But in ten years, carbon dioxide levels have leapt, and temperatures followed. The breaching of +1.5°C is inevitable.
And yet, COPs are wondrous
There’s common purpose. They point at the deniers and the selfish. They provide an energy to social and political change. They’re talked about.
For we have much to share. Remarkably, things are happening with renewables. They are reaching a scale where costs are falling and businesses, households and whole communities start to look daft in not adopting.
A quiz question. What links these seven countries: Iceland, Norway, Albania, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Paraguay and Uruguay?
It is this: their electricity supply systems are 100% renewable. A mix of wind, solar, hydro and geothermal has saved them huge sums of money by not having to purchase fossil fuels. These countries did this not by accident, but by intent. Governments chose.
Another question. When you spend capital on renewable energy infrastructure, what are the running costs of producing energy?
This is easy. It’s virtually zero. You get electricity for nothing, for 25, 30, 35 years. And there are no clean up costs. No air pollution to damage health. No greenhouse gases.
Countries are saving money; so are households
Typically, adoption follows an S-curve. For a long period, slow growth, then the exponential steep part, then a flattening. But after 80% of adoption, you don’t need to worry about the last bit. We know that systems then tip.
Life on the S-curve is something staggering, as Bill McKibben writes in his new book, “Here Comes the Sun.”
In 2004, it took the world one year to install 1GW (gigawatt) of solar generation. In 2016, it took one week; in 2023 one day; in 2024 just 18 hours.
This is happening fast.
Here’s the example of electric vehicles (EVs), as Tim Lenton shows in “Positive Tipping Points.”
In 2010, there were 3,000 EVs in the whole world. By 2022, there were 10 million; in 2024, 40 million. Doubling times for adoption are one and a half years. In four more doubling periods, a total of six years, there will be 640 million EVs worldwide. One more doubling period, and all fossil fuel vehicles will be gone. They’ll be stranded assets, along with ships burning oil to move oil, and petrol stations and domestic tankers.
In China, EV car companies are now offering 600,000-mile warranties, so confident are they in the technology. It’s going to take a lot of years for most people to drive that far.
A small change in policy can help
All countries across Europe are suffering higher gas prices since the invasion of Ukraine. Germany has just deregulated the installation of solar PV on balconies and roofs of flats. 1.5 million people have acted. Solar panels are suddenly everywhere. Their energy costs have fallen. The country is safer too. Now the same in Italy, Poland and Spain.
Solar panels are, after all, now cheaper than garden fences.
In Pakistan, national electricity demand fell by 10% last year. Households, farmers, businesses are buying cheap solar panels from China, installing them on every roof and spare patch of land. In six months last year, people installed 30% of national grid power. Diesel sales fell across the country by 30%.
The UK is good-bad
The first country to have a legally binding Climate Change Act. The first country deliberately to remove coal from all electricity generation: the last plant closed in late 2024. Yet oddly hesitating over renewables.
Let’s put this in perspective. Sizewell is the UK’s next nuclear power station. It’s going to take a long time to build; it’ll be late (they all are); we’ll pay more (we always do). And at the end, it’ll produce a meagre 3GW per year.
Don’t laugh. This is true. In Wyoming this year, legislators filed a Bill entitled “Make Carbon Dioxide Great Again.”
Yet in the Dakotas, 85% of electricity is now from renewable sources. Tiny Vermont is saving $2 billion per year by not paying to import fossil fuels into the state. Some get it, some don’t.
So what’s our story now?
We’re still in a hole.
Anyone born before 1990 has lived through the good times, and then the fast slide into the hole. 1990 was the last safe year, when carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was at 350 ppm (parts per million). Today it’s 427, and rising. Very unsafe.
Anyone born after 2010 has only seen the bottom of the hole. They’re going to be the first generation to experience the single direction of upward movement. It’s going to feel very good indeed.
COPs are important. They stop forgetfulness.
COPS are flawed. Agreements are hard, and blockers love to do their thing.
Here we are then. In a decade when systems will flip, costs and pollution fall. When countries will find that green growth brings new jobs, better health and lower energy costs.
As Nick Stern recently wrote, “When some step back, others step forward.” The arc of history is being revealed.
We do still have choices.
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| Source: 5 Examples of Greenwashing |
Four of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies have spent the last 25 years deceptively portraying themselves as leaders in addressing climate change while simultaneously expanding fossil fuel production and failing to meaningfully rein in their planet-heating emissions, according to a report released Thursday that examined over 300 of the companies’ climate-related advertisements from 2000 to 2025.
These ads collectively serve to mask the harmful impacts of the companies’ operations and to perpetuate a false narrative that the oil industry is an essential partner in the fight against climate change, the Center for Climate Integrity found.
CCI, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization supporting efforts to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate harms, said its analysis is the first of its kind scrutinizing hundreds of climate-relevant ads from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell across the first quarter of the 21st century.
It was around the turn of the century, when outright denial of the reality of climate change had become untenable, that the fossil fuel industry pivoted in its messaging and advertising strategy toward promoting false promises and solutions for tackling the problem, CCI says in “Big Oil’s Deceptive Climate Ads.”
The report identifies and discusses seven categories of deceptive advertising during this time period, including overstating actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; exaggerating investments in renewable energy; deflecting responsibility by shifting it onto consumers; and falsely promoting natural gas, carbon capture, hydrogen and algae biofuels as viable climate solutions.
“Big Oil’s climate deception has evolved from lying about the problem to lying about solutions,” Richard Wiles, CCI’s president, said in a statement. “For two and half decades now, these companies have sold the public a false and misleading image of their industry as working to solve the climate crisis, all while doubling down on fossil fuels and making the problem worse.”
The analysis draws upon publicly accessible sources such as digital advertising libraries and archives, congressional investigations and reports, and corporate and public relations documents. It adds to a growing body of evidence of a decades-long and ongoing campaign of deception by the industry to deny or downplay its climate impacts, to delay the transition to clean energy and to obstruct climate action.
A joint staff report from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee and the Senate Budget Committee released last year documents how major oil companies use what the Democrats described as deceptive messaging and tactics to promote false promises of new technologies and to mislead about their commitments to reducing emissions and about the climate safety of natural gas. The report marked the culmination of a multi-year investigation that involved hearings and subpoenas and revealed numerous internal company documents.
“As this joint report makes clear, the industry’s outright denial of climate change has evolved into a green-seeming cover for its ongoing covert operation—a campaign of deception, disinformation, and doublespeak waged using dark money, phony front groups, false economics, and relentless exertion of political influence—to block climate progress,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), then-chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said in a press release accompanying that report.
Greenwashed or deceptive advertising has also been a key part of this campaign, the CCI report says.
“In advertisements targeting the public, these four Big Oil companies repeatedly misrepresented the sustainability of their business practices, deflected responsibility for fueling climate harms, and lied about the viability of their proposed climate solutions, from carbon capture and storage to algae biofuels,” the report concludes.
Inside Climate News reached out to BP, Chevron, Shell and ExxonMobil for comment. None immediately responded. Companies such as Exxon have pushed back in court against allegations of deceptive advertising by claiming the allegations are attacks on their protected free speech rights.
Ads touting the companies’ emission-reduction initiatives, the report found, tend to overinflate the impact of these actions and create a misleading impression that the companies have dramatically lowered their overall emissions. But in reality, the actions typically are limited to oil companies’ operational emissions, such as reducing flaring, and do not account for emissions generated by their products, which make up the vast majority of their carbon pollution.
Furthermore, ads highlighting future plans or promises to reduce emissions and transition to low-carbon business models are misleading, the report says, especially considering that the companies are now rolling back their green commitments.
“In 2024, less than four years after advertising plans to change their business plans to support a shift towards net zero emissions, BP and Shell both abandoned goals to significantly reduce emissions and lower the carbon intensity of their businesses,” the report says.
Some other ads from these companies published since 2000 depict them embracing renewable energy like wind and solar, but as the report says, this obscures the reality that oil companies’ actual investments in renewables are miniscule: “One analysis found that between 2010 and 2018, BP spent only 2.3 percent of its total capital expenditure on renewables, Shell spent 1.3 percent, Chevron spent 0.23 percent, and ExxonMobil spent 0.22 percent.”
In some cases, oil companies are also abandoning renewable energy projects and cutting back on their low carbon portfolio spending. BP and Shell, for example, are scrapping wind energy development, and earlier this year Shell announced plans to slash investments in low-carbon energy from 20 percent to 10 percent of its total capital expenditure by 2030. This week, ExxonMobil revealed its updated corporate plan that includes reducing its spending on low-carbon investments by one-third.
Another category of oil company ads the report identifies as deceptive is one in which responsibility for reducing emissions is shifted onto individual consumers. BP, through its advertising and PR, for example, popularized the concept of the individual’s carbon footprint, the report says. These types of ads deflect from the role that the oil and gas industry has played in locking society into dependency on its products, the report contends.
Big oil company advertisements touting natural gas as clean or climate-friendly or as an essential partner to renewable energy ignore the reality that gas still contributes substantially to climate change, especially considering methane venting and leakage, the report says. Natural gas is composed almost entirely of methane, which is a greenhouse gas that is 84 times more powerful than CO2 over a 20-year timeframe.
In addition to promoting what the report calls the false solution of natural gas, oil companies have used advertising to highlight and push false promises about carbon capture and storage and about hydrogen, claiming these technologies are key to a low-carbon future.
Carbon capture technologies have existed for decades and have failed to sequester more than a miniscule amount of global emissions. Most carbon capture and storage operations also end up using the captured CO2 to extract more oil—a process known as enhanced oil recovery—which critics say cancels out much of the supposed climate benefit and serves to further prolong the fossil fuel era.
Hydrogen, meanwhile, is conventionally produced using fossil fuels, and so-called green hydrogen made from water does not yet exist on any large scale. Despite company advertisements touting hydrogen’s promise, it remains decades away from wide-scale deployment, and almost all hydrogen production today is based on fossil fuels, contrary to its depictions in company ads as a clean fuel, the report says.
The report also discusses advertisements by ExxonMobil around algae biofuels, arguing the company deceptively portrayed these fuels as a climate solution when in reality it was never seriously committed to investing and scaling the technology. “While Exxon poured millions of dollars into algae advertisements, the company never built a commercial-scale algae biofuels facility—which would have cost around $5 billion—and ended its funding for algae research entirely in late-2022,” the report said.
Hundreds of ads across these categories from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell over the last 25 years collectively “feed a larger false narrative that oil and gas companies are part of the solution to climate change,” the report concludes, which allows them to sustain their social license to operate while they continue expanding production and fueling the climate crisis.
The report comes as the industry faces dozens of climate accountability lawsuits aiming to hold companies accountable for deceptive conduct, including ongoing greenwashing and false or misleading advertising. Some of the cases are already in pre-trial discovery and are closer than ever to getting to the stage of a public trial.
CCI says its analysis is intended to support these efforts.
“Any business that floods consumers with such brazenly deceptive advertising must be held accountable,” Wiles said.
From The Guardian
Rising global heat is now killing one person a minute around the world, a major report on the health impact of the climate crisis has revealed.
It says the world’s addiction to fossil fuels also causes toxic air pollution, wildfires and the spread of diseases such as dengue fever, and millions each year are dying owing to the failure to tackle global heating.
The report, the most comprehensive to date, says the damage to health will get worse with leaders such as Donald Trump ripping up climate policies and oil companies continuing to exploit new reserves.
Governments gave out $2.5bn a day in direct subsidies to fossil fuel users and producers in 2023, the researchers found, while people lost about the same amount because of high temperatures preventing them from working on farms and building sites.
Reduced coal burning has saved about 400 lives a day in the last decade, the report says, and renewable energy production is rising fast. But the experts say a healthy future is impossible if fossil fuels continue to be financed at current rates.
Dr Marina Romanello, of University College London (UCL), who led the analysis, said: “This [report] paints a bleak and undeniable picture of the devastating health harms reaching all corners of the world. The destruction to lives and livelihoods will continue to escalate until we end our fossil fuel addiction.
“We’re seeing millions of deaths occurring needlessly every year because of our delay in mitigating climate change and our delay in adapting to the climate change that cannot be avoided. We’re seeing key leaders, governments and corporations backsliding on climate commitments and putting people increasingly in harm’s way.”
The report says the rate of heat-related deaths has surged by 23% since the 1990s, even after accounting for increases in populations, to an average of 546,000 a year between 2012 and 2021.
“That is approximately one heat-related death every minute throughout the year,” said Prof Ollie Jay, of the University of Sydney, Australia, who was part of the analysis team. “It is a really startling number and the numbers are going up.”
Jay said: “We constantly emphasise to people that heat stress can affect everybody and it can be deadly – I think a lot of people don’t understand that – and that every heat-related death is preventable.”
Laura Clarke, the chief executive of the environmental law firm ClientEarth, said: “We are living through the era of climate consequences. Heatwaves, floods, drought and disease are no longer distant warnings – they’re here now. But as attribution science, climate litigation and grassroots activism grow, accountability for climate impacts is no longer a question of if but when.”
The 2025 edition of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change was led by UCL in collaboration with the World Health Organization and produced by 128 experts from more than 70 academic institutions and UN agencies.
In the past four years, the average person has been exposed to 19 days a year of life-threatening heat and 16 of those days would not have happened without human-caused global heating, the report says. Overall, exposure to high temperatures resulted in a record 639bn hours of lost labour in 2024, which caused losses of 6% of national GDP in the least developed nations.
The continued burning of fossil fuels not only heats the planet but also produces air pollution, causing millions of deaths a year. Wildfires, stoked by increasingly hot and dry conditions, are adding to the deaths caused by smoke, with a record 154,000 deaths recorded in 2024, the report says. Droughts and heatwaves damage crops and livestock and 123 million more people endured food insecurity in 2023, compared with the annual average between 1981 and 2010.
Yet there are still imbeciles (or people in the pay of fossil fuel companies) who deny that global heating is happening.
This is my chart using data from Our World In Data of the price of PV panels in US$ per watt, in constant 2024 dollars. In other words, a 5000 kW system, ignoring inverter, grid connections, land, and installation would cost 5000x30 cents, or $1500. (Of course, this pricing is for wholesale systems with economies of scale; a rooftop solar system would be more expensive.) This is a 99.8% fall from 1975.
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| Note logarithmic scale |
So you've got to add the cost of storage. And the fact is, battery prices are falling even faster than PV prices.
This chart shows BNEF's battery costs survey data, also in constant dollars, with my estimates for 2025 and 2026. If you do the numbers, it turns out that adding 4 hours of storage to a solar farm will add just $12/MWh of electricity generated to the cost. Adding 8 hours storage would cost $24/MWh, which is still cheaper than new coal, or (outside the US) new gas.
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| Note log scale |
But, I hear the denialists wail, what about dunkeflaute, those periods in high latitudes when there is no wind, and little solar, and it's cold? Well, until we get long-term storage, we will need gas peaking. We can make the gas using electrolysis of water, and using the hydrogen produced to make methane via the Sabatier system, which would in effect be long-term storage. Or we can go on using fossil gas. But even if we do the latter, we will still have cut emissions from electricity generation by 95%.
A final chart from Our World in Data. It shows a classic "learning curve". A new technology starts. It's expensive, and has only a few uses out in the wild. But usage increases. Manufacturers get a bit better at making it. Demand increases, costs fall. Falling costs lead to still more demand, which in turn leads to still lower prices, and so on, until the technology has gained a 100% market share.
The chart uses a double log scale. On the vertical axis, each tick mark shows a halving of PV module prices. On the horizontal axis, each tick mark shows a 10-fold increase in cumulative installations. So each 10-fold increase in installations leads to a halving of module prices --- and vice versa.
There is probably another 10-fold increase in solar installations in prospect over the next 10 years. Which will be associated with another halving of the cost of solar. Meanwhile, the rapid progress of EVS and the need for stationary storage will drive down battery costs, which will continue to halve every four years.
This is irresistible. The learning curve is being driven by fierce competition, which in turn drives rapid technological advance. There is nothing Trump or Big Oil or coal miners or the rabid Right can do about this. They can delay the technological advances in the USA, which will just retard the US economy, but in the rest of the world, the advance of solar plus storage to market dominance in inevitable. Except in high latitudes.
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| Canadian oil sands |
From Distilled
Decarbonizing the world’s economy will require an enormous amount of minerals like copper, lithium, nickel and cobalt. Everything from electric vehicles to solar panels to transmission lines will require these raw materials.
In some cases, mining these minerals has disastrous consequences for workers, indigenous communities, and the environment. This has led some clean energy skeptics to argue that decarbonization will be bad for both humans and the environment.
But transitioning to clean energy will mean we no longer have to mine and extract vast quantities of fossil fuels each year. A clean energy transition will help us avoid the worst effects of climate change; it will save millions of lives currently lost to air pollution each year; and, importantly, it will reduce the total amount of environmentally and socially harmful mining each year.
In 2020, 7 million tons of minerals were mined globally for low-carbon energy, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). (These are often referred to as “transition minerals.”) In order to limit warming to 2 degrees celsius, we’ll need to scale up that production to about 28 million tons per year.
That’s a lot of transition minerals. But how does it compare to the mining and extraction of today’s fossil fuel economy?
Every year, about 15 billion tons of fossil fuels are mined and extracted. That’s about 535 times more mining than a clean energy economy would require in 2040.
Part of the reason for this massive difference in mining requirements is the fact that fossil fuel infrastructure is much less energy efficient than clean energy technology. Gas-powered cars are three times less efficient than electric vehicles. Gas furnaces are three to four times less efficient than heat pumps. Coal, oil, and gas all need to be transported long distances from mine or well to the source of combustion.
A clean energy economy just requires much less energy than a fossil fuel economy.
But there’s another important reason for this difference. Fossil fuel infrastructure requires constant fuel input. Building a coal or gas power plant, like building a wind or solar project, requires a lot of materials and energy input upfront. But for a fossil fuel power plant, construction is just the beginning. In order to generate power, you need to burn coal or gas every day for decades. Wind and solar projects, by comparison, don’t require any ongoing fuel input.
Still, both the environmental and human impacts of mining minerals for the energy transition can’t be ignored. Policymakers should use every tool available to both minimize the total amount of clean energy minerals needed in the future and ensure those minerals are mined in socially and environmentally-friendly ways.
But make no mistake: transitioning away from fossil fuels is one of the most effective ways to protect both the environment and the most marginalized communities in the world.
Don't know who the cartoonist is. If you know, let me know so I can give attribution.
From Leon Simons
As more and more clean air regulations came into effect from the 1960s onward, CO₂ and sulphur dioxide (SO₂) emissions gradually decoupled. SO₂ emissions reached a global peak around 1980: academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...
There was an almost perfect correlation between CO₂ and SO₂ emissions. But this has turned into a strong anti-correlation:
This was made possible by strict clean air regulations, enforcement and compliance. Notably at coal plants, where enormous 'flue-gas desulphurisation systems were installed. The increase in sulphur emissions temporarily stopped global warming for about 40 years:
But it's crucial to take into account where the sulphur is emitted. While the oceans "only" cover about 71% of Earth's surface, about 90% of global warming is ocean warming, while only 1-2% heats the atmosphere:
Removing the reflective particles and clouds above the oceans (Earth's main heat sink!) has much stronger climate impacts than most realise. Which is why the very recent desulphurisation of global shipping is crucial to take into account. The IMO [International Maritime Organisation]sulphur regulations made this possible. And there are more regulations in the pipeline!
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| Leon Simons notes that the rise in SO2 emissions before 1900 seems suss, and discusses it in his Bluesky thread (linked above) |
Back in 1990, Hansen & Lacis described an "extreme" scenario of half the GHG [Greenhouse gas] forcing being compensated by a negative aerosol forcing. Looking at the same agents, IPCC AR6 WG1 showed it as 66% for the 1850-1989 period. It was likely even more!The moral of all this is obvious:
