Burning the planet

Since the Paris agreement in 2015, the world's 60 largest banks have poured $3.8tn into fossil fuel companies. People in rich nations seek to blame climate breakdown on India and China, which continue to develop new coal plants. But an estimated 40 percent of the ‘committed emissions’ for the Asian coal plants sampled by researchers can be attributed to banks and investors in Europe and the US. Even if guilt were to be apportioned by nationality – a preposterous notion in a world where money moves freely and power is wielded across borders – we could not detach ourselves from these decisions.

There's scarcely a fossil fuel project on Earth that has not been facilitated by public money. In 2020, according to the International Monetary Fund, governments spent $450bn in direct subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. The IMF accounts the other costs the industry imposes on us – pollution, destruction and climate chaos – at $5.5tn. But I find such figures meaningless: dollars can't capture the loss of human life and the trashing of ecosystems, let alone the prospect of systemic environmental collapse. One in five of all deaths, according to a recent estimate, are now caused by fossil fuel pollution.

Public finance corporations are still pouring money into coal, oil and gas: in the past three years, G20 governments and multinational development banks outrageously spent two and a half times as much money on international finance for fossil fuels as they did on renewables. On one account, 93 percent of the world's coal plants are protected from market forces by special government contracts and uncompetitive tariffs. The UK has reduced its petroleum revenue tax for companies drilling for oil to zero. As a result, our oilfields are likely soon to cost the exchequer more money than it gains. What's the point?

For just $161bn – a fraction of the money governments spend on supporting fossil fuels – they could buy out and shut down every coal plant on Earth. If they did so as part of a just transition, they would create more employment than they destroy. For example, research by Oil Change International suggests the UK could generate three jobs in clean energy for every one lost from oil and gas.

Everything about the relationship between nation states and the fossil fuel industry is perverse, stupid and self-destructive. For the sake of this dirty industry's profits and dividends – overwhelmingly concentrated among a tiny number of the world's people – governments commit us to catastrophe.

All over the world, people are mobilising to change this, and their voices need to be heard in Glasgow. The campaign to create a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty has gathered the signatures of thousands of scientists and more than 100 Nobel laureates.

Excerpted: ‘Keep Fossil Fuels in the Ground. Everything Else Is Just Talk’

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