This year’s United Nations climate summit (COP29) arrived at a bleak moment for those concerned about the future of the planet. The world just experienced the hottest year in recorded history, as well as the first time that global average temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. For the past decade, governments have been working collectively to try to contain the planet’s overall warming to 1.5 degrees. That goal, set by the 2015 Paris Agreement, is rapidly slipping away. While climate change negotiations are complex and touch upon nearly every aspect of the world economy, their success increasingly hinges on the willingness of the fossil fuel industry – which includes the producers of oil, gas, and coal – to cooperate and stop blocking progress.
COP29 was a tense and combative summit.
COP29 took place in Azerbaijan, a Central Asian petrostate whose economy is dependent on revenues from fossil fuel exports. During the summit’s opening ceremony, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan set the tone by calling his country’s oil and gas resources a “gift of God” and accusing the “Western fake news media” and NGOs of spreading misinformation about his government. David Gelles, a journalist for the New York Times who attended COP29, described how the capital city of Baku is surrounded by oil fields and features skyscrapers designed to resemble gas flares. He wrote, “It smells like gasoline at the United Nations climate change conference here in Baku…”
Many key stakeholders opted not to attend COP29. The New York Times reported that heads of state from Brazil, China, Europe, India, South Africa, the United States, and elsewhere skipped the event. Many NGOs also chose not to attend, in large part because of Azerbaijan’s track record of repressing civic space. The summit resulted in a political commitment to provide developing countries with $300 billion per year in climate finance by 2035, but governments and civil society actors from the Global South criticized the deal for being grossly insufficient to help these countries respond to the growing effects of climate change.
Global climate action is way behind schedule.
Progress on international climate action is happening, but not at the speed that is needed to keep global temperatures from rising to catastrophic levels. Many people are working hard to transform the global economy into a safer and more sustainable system. Each year brings notable achievements, but also notable setbacks: global carbon dioxide emissions reached their highest levels ever in 2024.
A 2024 U.N. report concluded that current efforts “fall miles short” of what is needed. Climate change has already made wildfires, storms, flooding, and heatwaves more frequent and severe. At sustained warming of 1.5 degrees, which is now likely, the world will experience extreme heatwaves, heavy precipitation events, severe droughts, the spread of mosquito-borne diseases to new locations, flooding, and reductions in food sources, including fisheries and livestock. These impacts will compound if world hits 2 degrees warming, which could severely disrupt Earth’s natural systems, harming human life and the global economy on a massive scale. That is not even the worst-case scenario: according to the U.N.’s report, the world is on track to reach global warming of 2.6 degrees by the end of the century. This is an emergency.
Drastically reducing fossil fuel dependence is the only option.
With such enormous planetary stakes, it should come as no surprise that the U.N. Secretary General, the Pope, multinational corporations, investors, government leaders, scientists, and many others have called for a bolder response to limit further global warming, including phasing out fossil fuels.
There is overwhelming scientific evidence that fossil fuels – especially coal, oil, and gas – are the primary drivers of the climate crisis. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that the international community needs to substantially reduce fossil fuel use and rapidly transition to other energy sources in order to avoid the most dangerous climate change scenarios. The International Energy Agency has concluded that the fossil fuel industry faces a “moment of truth” and needs to scale back, rather than expand, its oil and gas operations.
Instead of phasing out fossil fuels, the industry is scaling up production.
At COP28, last year’s climate summit held in Dubai, governments reached an historic agreement to transition away from fossil fuels. The victory was short-lived. At this year’s COP, following intense counter-lobbying by Saudi Arabia, the delegates were unable to recommit to the fossil fuel transition, deciding instead to defer negotiations until the following year.
Meanwhile, companies and fossil fuel-producing governments are scaling up their production. Last year, the New York Times reported, “In 2030, if current projections hold, the United States will drill for more oil and gas than at any point in its history. Russia and Saudi Arabia plan to do the same.” Governments are also supporting increased production through an estimated $7 trillion dollars in subsidies that help to give oil and gas a competitive advantage over other energy sources.
In 2025, governments have an opportunity to lay the groundwork for a successful fossil fuel phaseout but are not yet rising to the challenge.
Of course, the process for phasing fossil fuels out of the global economy will not be simple. Energy security remains a strategic priority, as does a just transition for workers in the fossil fuel industry. Some key economic activities, such as long-distance trucking, air travel, and sea shipping, do not yet have good technological alternatives to oil, gas, and coal. Energy experts from the United Nations, governments, private sector, academia, and civil society are working on this challenge and have developed various roadmaps, such as the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative that calls for greater supply-side measures to complement the emissions reduction focus of the Paris Agreement.
As part of the 2025 climate negotiations, governments are expected to finalize their new Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which entail each government mapping out its contributions to global climate action through 2035. To contain global warming at 1.5 degrees, governments will need to make bold commitments as part of these NDCs, such as:
- Committing not to approve new fossil fuel projects. Beginning in 2025, governments would need to commit not to approve any new oil, gas, and coal projects. The International Energy Agency has concluded that this step is necessary to contain global warming to 1.5 degrees. While it might sound too radical and impractical to put an immediate end to new fossil fuel development, the reality is that the process for doing so is much more achievable than one might expect. For example, the International Institute for Sustainable Development has published research showing not only how to implement this commitment, but also describing how a simple, easy-to-understand norm such as “no new fossil fuel development” is necessary to catalyze widespread reforms.
- Avoiding the false security of relying on unproven technologies, such as carbon capture and storage, to justify further delay. Climate change policymakers are exploring a range of new technologies, such as carbon capture technology that stores emissions before it enters the atmosphere, and often include these options as part of the mix of potential pathways forward. However, the industry has also aggressively marketed these technologies as an alternative to phasing out fossil fuels. While technologies such as carbon capture and storage could indeed be helpful in the long run, the reality is that they have failed to operate at scale despite years of effort. The technology is simply not able to substitute for a fossil fuel phaseout.
Governments already face significant political pressure to transition away from fossil fuels, but even stronger political pressure is necessary. So far, few governments have signaled a willingness to act. As COP29 illustrated, the parties to the Paris Agreement are still quibbling over symbolic diplomatic words and have taken few steps towards actual implementation of a fossil fuel phaseout.
The NDCs are the best near-term opportunity to focus on implementation. Brazil, which will host COP30 in late 2025, has helped set the tone as one of the first countries to publish its NDC. Many climate advocates are hopeful that Brazil will emerge as a new torchbearer for bold climate action, because of its status as a major global economy, the host of COP30, and the state with jurisdiction over much of the critically important Amazon rainforest. But while Brazil announced an ambitious emissions reduction target in its NDC, it avoided any specific commitments to phase out fossil fuels.
The United Nations could help by revisiting the way that climate negotiations are structured.
The current structure of the U.N. climate change negotiations makes it especially difficult to move forward on a fossil fuel phaseout. The annual climate summits have become a pay-to-play venue where the wealthiest actors – including those with vested interests in undermining the negotiations – have greater access to decision-makers than do Indigenous communities and local community leaders, who are living on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Christina Toenshoff, a professor at Leiden University, has analyzed the ways in which the fossil fuel industry exerts influence over the U.N. climate negotiations, noting that individual companies have been invited to sponsor events in exchange for privileged access to negotiators, and that some fossil fuel representatives have been invited to join governments’ negotiating teams. While some fossil fuel industry representatives participate in the process in good faith, many others work to delay progress and spread misinformation.
In the runup to COP29, several high-profile world leaders and policy experts – including former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon – sent a letter to the U.N. calling for a “fundamental overhaul of the COP.” They urged the U.N. to reform the way that climate summits are organized, with a much greater focus on implementation of commitments, accountability, and equitable participation of those who are bearing the disproportionate impacts of the crisis.
If governments don’t rise to the challenge, nonstate actors can still lead the way in phasing out fossil fuels.
Even if the U.N. climate negotiations continue to stagnate, nonstate actors can continue to lay the groundwork for a transition away from fossil fuels. COP30, set in the Brazilian Amazon, will highlight the essential contributions that Indigenous peoples and other local communities make towards global climate goals through their locally-focused actions. A full fossil fuel phaseout might not be possible without government help, but nonstate actors such as civil society, the private sector, and local communities might still be able to play a role in ensuring that the most harmful of proposed fossil fuel projects do not move forward.
Helping communities to advance their local objectives – to protect their property rights from land grabbing, avoid the effects of water and air pollution associated with fossil fuel extraction, and reduce violence against who speak up to challenge industry interests – could all carry significant benefits for global climate action. Local citizens’ movements could lead the fossil fuel phaseout.
To support communities in their local efforts, international civil society and the private sector could take steps such as:
- Protecting civic space and ending the criminalization of critics of fossil fuel projects. As the climate crisis deepens, protests and acts of civil disobedience are on the rise. Studies suggest that these actions help attract public attention and media coverage to climate change. Equally importantly, these actions provide local communities that are adversely affected by fossil fuel projects with a means to advocate for their rights. However, in several parts of the world, the fossil fuel industry has attempted to silence its critics, especially those who engage in protest and civil disobedience. In the United States, for example, the industry has advocated for harsher criminal penalties, including felony and domestic terrorism charges, for nonviolent protesters who commit minor illegal acts such as trespassing or blocking traffic. It has also used strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) and other judicial harassment tactics against its critics, such as Energy Transfer’s ongoing $300 million lawsuit against Greenpeace. Responsible private sector actors do not need to join fossil fuel companies in enabling these attacks. Indeed, private sector actors have a vested interest in protecting civic space and could join the ranks of companies that are adopting policies to avoid contributing to these sorts of attacks.
- Holding the fossil fuel industry accountable for pollution impacts. In countless cases, fossil fuel companies have shifted the costs of their operations onto local stakeholders by leaving pollution unaddressed at their sites or forcing taxpayers to pay for the cleanup. For example, companies routinely abandon oil and gas wells that have reached the end of their productive lifespan, in order to avoid the costs of restoring the land to a safe environmental condition. Abandoned and orphaned wells often leak methane, a potent greenhouse gas, as well as other toxic chemicals that can endanger local communities and contaminate drinking water. In 2020, Reuters estimated that there are over 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells in the United States alone, amounting to an estimated $60 to $435 billion in potential liabilities owed by the U.S. fossil fuel industry. Insurance companies and investors should take a closer look at where these liabilities exist when doing business with the industry. Lawyers should also scale up efforts to require fossil fuel companies to pay to clean up their pollution and help ensure that communities that have suffered harm can obtain remedies through civil litigation or other means.
- Strengthening oversight of the fossil fuel industry’s misleading advertising campaigns. Several civil society organizations are actively monitoring the fossil fuel industry’s collaborations with the world’s largest public relations firms to sway public opinion and decrease political pressure for a fossil fuel phaseout. The industry’s advertising campaigns have used a range of tactics, such as coded language that confuses public perceptions of what steps fossil fuel companies are actually taking to respond to the climate crisis. Some of these public relations initiatives might have also involved tortious or outright illegal behavior; for example, Reuters recently reported that the U.S. government is investigating public affairs company DCI Group for allegedly facilitating a hacking operation that targeted some of Exxon’s most prominent public critics. Public relations firms have historically escaped scrutiny, but the time has come both for civil society and investors to begin taking a closer look at the behind-the-scenes companies that act as “enablers” of environmental and human rights harms.
Conclusion
The fossil fuel industry has enormous political power and has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to use its influence to block climate action and even silence its critics. Unfortunately, the industry has succeeded in delaying progress by decades and narrowing the window of opportunity to preserve a livable planet. The year 2025 needs to become a year of action, beginning with bold steps towards a fossil fuel phaseout – with or without the fossil fuel industry’s cooperation.