A recent study in the scientific journal Nature suggests that to stand a 50% chance of avoiding more than 1.5C of global heating, we need to retire 89% of proven coal reserves, 58% of oil reserves and 59% of fossil methane (“natural gas”) reserves. If we want better odds than 50-50, we’ll need to leave almost all of them untouched. Yet most governments with major reserves are determined to make the wrong choice. As the latestproduction gap report by the UN and academic researchers shows, over the next two decades, unless there’s a rapid and drastic change in policy, coal is likely to decline a little, but oil and gas production will keep growing. By 2030, governments are planning to extract 110% more fossil fuels than their Paris agreement pledge (“limit the temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels”) would permit. Even nations that claim to be leading the transition mean to keep drilling.  The oil corporations have spent many millions of dollars on ads, memes and films to convince us they’ve gone green. But the latest report on this issue by the International Energy Agency reveals that in 2020 “clean energy investments by the oil and gas industry accounted for only around 1% of total capital expenditure”. 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 for 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 ofsystemic environmental collapse. One in five of all deaths, according to a recent estimate, are now caused by fossil fuel pollution. 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% of the “committed emissions” for the Asian coal plants sampled by researchers can be attributed to banks and investors in Europe and the US. 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.                    https://www.monbiot.com/2021/11/05/groundtruthed/