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fossil fuel subsidies
UN Expert Calls for 'Defossilization' of World Economy, Criminal Penalties for Big Oil Climate Disinformation
Fossil fuel companies have for decades "instilled doubt about the need to act on, and the viability of, renewables," said U.N. climate expert Elisa Morgera.
Jun 30, 2025
As health officials across Europe issued warnings Monday about extreme heat that could stretch into the middle of the week in several countries—the kind of dangerous conditions that meteorologists have consistently said are likely to grow more frequent due to human-caused climate change—a top United Nations climate expert told the international body in Geneva that the "defossilization" of all the world's economies is needed.
Elisa Morgera, the U.N. special rapporteur on climate change, presented her recent report on "the imperative of defossilizing our economies," with a focus on the wealthy countries that are projected to increase their extraction and use of fossil fuels despite the fact that "there is no scientific doubt that fossil fuels... are the main cause of climate change."
"Despite overwhelming evidence of the interlinked, intergenerational, severe, and widespread human rights impacts of the fossil fuel life cycle," said Morgera, "these countries have and are still accruing enormous profits from fossil fuels, and are still not taking decisive action."
World leaders must recognize the phase-out of fossil fuels "as the single most impactful health contribution" they could make, she argued.
Morgera named the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada as wealthy nations where governments are still handing out billions of dollars in subsidies to fossil fuel companies each year—direct payments, tax breaks, and other financial support whose elimination could reduce worldwide fossil fuel emissions by 10% by 2030, according to the report.
"These countries are responsible for not having prevented the widespread human rights harm arising from climate change and other planetary crises we are facing—biodiversity loss, plastic pollution, and economic inequalities—caused by fossil fuels extraction, use, and waste," said Morgera.
She also pointed to the need to "defossilize knowledge" by holding accountable the companies that have spent decades denying their own scientists' knowledge that continuing to extract oil, coal, and gas would heat the planet and cause catastrophic sea-level rise, hurricanes, flooding, and dangerous extreme heat, among other weather disasters.
Defossilizing information systems, said Morgera, would mean protecting "human rights in the formation of public opinion and democratic debate from undue commercial influence" and correcting decades of "information distortions" that have arisen from the public's ongoing exposure to climate disinformation at the hands of fossil fuel giants, the corporate media, and climate-denying politicians.
Morgera said states should prohibit all fossil fuel industry lobbying, which companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron spent more than $153 million last year in the U.S. alone—with spending increasing each year since 2020, according to OpenSecrets.
"More recent research has documented climate obstruction—intentional delaying efforts, including through media ownership and influence, waged against efforts for effective climate action aligned with the current scientific consensus," wrote Morgera. "Fossil fuel companies' lobbyists have increased their influence in public policy spaces internationally... and at the national level, to limit regulations and enforcement. They have instilled doubt about the need to act on, and the viability of, renewables, and have promoted speculative or ineffective solutions that present additional lock-in risks and higher costs."
While a transition to a renewable energy-based economy has been portrayed by the fossil fuel industry and its supporters in government as "radical," such a transition "is now cheaper and safer for our economics and a healthier option for our societies," Morgera told The Guardian on Monday.
"The transition can also lead to significant savings of taxpayer money that is currently going into responding to climate change impacts, saving health costs, and also recouping lost tax revenue from fossil fuel companies," she said. "This could be the single most impactful health contribution we could ever make. The transition seems radical and unrealistic because fossil fuel companies have been so good at making it seem so."
In addition to lobbying bans, said Morgera, governments around the world must ban fossil fuel advertising and criminalize "misinformation and misrepresentation (greenwashing) by the fossil fuel industry" as well as media and advertising firms that have amplified the industry's disinformation and misinformation.
Several countries have taken steps toward meeting Morgera's far-reaching demands, with The Hague in the Netherlands introducing a municipal ordinance in 2023 banning fossil fuel ads, the Australian Green Party backing such a ban, and Western Australia implementing one.
The fossil fuel industry's "playbook of climate obstruction"—from lobbying at national policymaking summits like the annual U.N. Climate Change Conference to downplaying human rights impacts like destructive storms and emphasizing the role of fossil fuels in "economic growth"—has "undermined the protection of all human rights that are negatively impacted by climate change for over six decades," said Morgera.
Morgera pointed to three ways in which states' obligations under international humanitarian laws underpin the need for a fossil fuel phaseout by 2030:
- The survival of states that contributed minimally to climate change is impaired by loss of territory to sea-level rise and/or protracted unsafe climatic conditions;
- People are substantially deprived of their means of subsistence because of the severe deterioration of entire ecosystems due to climate change due to flooding, drought, and extreme heat; and
- The cultural survival of the populations of small island developing states, Indigenous peoples, people of African descent, peasants and small-scale fishers is impaired by loss of territories, protracted unsafe climatic conditions and/or severe ecosystem degradation.
Morgera's report was presented as more than a third of Tuvaluans applied for a visa to move to Australia under a new climate deal between the two countries, as the Pacific island is one of the most vulnerable places on Earth to rising sea levels and severe storms.
Morgera said that fossil fuel industry's impact on the human rights of people across the Global South—who have contributed little to the worsening of the climate emergency—"compels urgent defossilization of our whole economies, as part of a just, effective, and transformative transition."Keep ReadingShow Less
Big Polluters Dodged Their Duties at COP29; Will the ICJ Hold Them to Account?
Rich countries must pay up for the climate action needed to halt the climate crisis they have created and remedy the climate harms that they have inflicted.
Dec 13, 2024
The recent COP29 climate finance deal is a stark example of how wealthy historical emitters continue to evade their responsibilities to pay for climate action and remedy climate harm. But they cannot escape rising demands for accountability. In the historic hearings on states' climate obligations at the International Court of Justice, which are drawing to a close, developing nations are forcing them to face the law.
The timing of these ICJ hearings, on the heels of yet another failure of the United Nations climate talks, underscores what's at stake.
The headlines have called COP29's climate finance deal a triumph of diplomacy, but this could not be farther from the truth. Wealthy nations responsible for the majority of cumulative greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have carefully engineered an escape from their climate obligations through a deal the terms of which are too loose, and that offers too little, too late.
We know rich countries can deliver the grants they owe to the Global South. They can raise well over $5 trillion a year by ending fossil fuel handouts, taxing the rich, and changing unfair global financial rules.
It's too loose: Despite the deal's reference to two finance figures, $1.3 trillion and $300 billion, both constitute a hollow promise. The text fails to hold developed countries to their legal duty to provide climate finance to the Global South. Actors are merely "called upon" to work toward scaling funding to $1.3 trillion per year by 2035, without any binding commitments. Even the $300 billion annual goal has been carefully worded to avoid any concrete obligations. Developed countries are only required to "take the lead" in "mobilizing" these funds, which can come from private finance, multilateral development banks, and other "alternative" sources.
As multiple states including Colombia, Sierra Leone, and Seychelles emphasized during the ICJ hearings, this vagueness disproportionately impacts debt-stressed nations already struggling to fund climate action. If rich countries can pass the buck to the private sector and Global South, the most climate-vulnerable nations may be forced to take on more loans and private investment schemes rather than grants, deepening the historic debt crisis already affecting 93% of them.
Private finance cannot cover the costs of climate action in the Global South. That approach has been tested and failed. Nor can carbon markets fill the gap. Yet, the deal leaves the door open to carbon finance being wrongly counted as climate finance, allowing polluters to claim other countries' climate action as their own through carbon offsets rather than requiring them to pay up and phase out fossil fuels at home. With under 16% of carbon credits currently achieving actual emission reductions, this doesn't underwrite climate ambition, it undermines it.
It's too little: Contrary to what UNFCCC lead Simon Stiell has suggested, what was agreed at COP29 is not a tripling of climate finance. When adjusted for inflation, the $300 billion target is no meaningful increase compared to the $100 billion annually promised by 2020—which rich countries failed to meet. As the decision's own preamble acknowledges, the scale of need in developing countries is on the order of trillions, not billions, annually for climate action between now and 2030. And that figure is neither unreasonable nor out of reach. For context, rich nations currently spend $378 billion yearly on fossil fuel subsidies alone, and fossil fuel companies raked in an average of over $1 trillion in annual profits over the last 10 years. The money exists—it's just being invested in climate destruction rather than climate action.
It's too late: Waiting until 2035 for full implementation of climate finance goals essentially writes off this critical decade for climate action.
The inadequacy of this climate finance deal means planning for failure when it comes to fossil fuel phaseout, and therefore locking in climate catastrophe. The necessary global transition away from fossil fuels can't happen at the speed and scale required unless the biggest polluters pay. The ink has barely dried on the agreement, and wealthy nations are already on the offense. E.U. Climate Commissioner Woebke Hoekstra suggested in De Telegraaf that the E.U. could reduce its share of climate finance contributions since "other country contributions count too." Meanwhile, U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband reframed the entire deal as an "investment opportunity," suggesting that private sector funding could cover the bill—precisely the kind of responsibility-shifting the agreement's language enables. Hoekstra celebrates the deal as 'the start of a new era for climate finance'. Sadly, this is true. A new era where the E.U., U.K., and other rich nations dodge their responsibility to pay—one where everyone is responsible and thus no one is.
But we know rich countries can deliver the grants they owe to the Global South. They can raise well over $5 trillion a year by ending fossil fuel handouts, taxing the rich, and changing unfair global financial rules.
We also know failing to provide needed climate finance doesn't just condemn Global South countries suffering most acutely from a crisis they didn't create. It undermines our collective future.
As the International Court of Justice deliberates on states' climate obligations, this inadequate finance deal illustrates exactly why judicial scrutiny and legal clarity is needed. The world cannot afford another decade of wealthy nations dodging their responsibilities while climate disasters mount.
We reject this deal for what it is—a carefully constructed escape hatch for wealthy nations. It's high time for the biggest polluters to stop hiding behind voluntary pledges and using the climate regime to protect themselves from climate accountability, rather than to protect people and the planet from climate destruction. Rich countries must pay up for the climate action needed to halt the climate crisis they have created and remedy the climate harms that they have inflicted. Doing so is not just a moral imperative, it's a legal obligation.
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Trump Win Fulfills Oligarchy's 50-Year Plan for Right-Wing Takeover
The billionaires have won. They have successfully killed the American Dream. And now we have to fight back.
Nov 06, 2024
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” — Frédéric Bastiat, Economic sophisms, 2nd series (1848)
We just watched the final fulfillment of a 50 year plan. Louis Powell laid it out in 1971, and every step along the way Republicans have follow it.
It was a plan to turn America over to the richest men and the largest corporations. It was a plan to replace democracy with oligarchy. A large handful of America’s richest people invested billions in this plan, and its tax breaks and fossil fuel subsidies have made them trillions. More will soon come to them.
As any advertising executive can tell you, with enough money and enough advertising — particularly if you are willing to lie — you can sell anybody pretty much anything.
This is not the end... hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal.
Even a convicted felon, rapist, and friend and agent of America’s enemies.
America was overwhelmed this fall by billions of dollars in often dishonest advertising, made possible by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and it worked. Democrats were massively outspent, not to mention the power of the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News” and 1500 hate talk radio stations.
Open the lens a bit larger, and we find that it goes way beyond just this election; virtually every crisis America is facing right now is either caused or exacerbated by the corruption of big money authorized by five corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court.
They are responsible for our crises of gun violence, the drug epidemic, homelessness, political gridlock, our slow response to the climate emergency, a looming crisis for Social Security and Medicare, the situation on our southern border, even the lack of affordable drugs, insurance, and healthcare.
All track back to a handful of Supreme Court justices who’ve sold their votes to billionaires in exchange for extravagant vacations, luxury yachts and motorhomes, private jet travel, speaking fees, homes, tuition, and participation in exclusive clubs and billionaire networks that bar the rest of us from entry.
For over two decades, Clarence Thomas and his wife have been accepting millions in free luxury vacations, tuition for their adopted son, a home for his mother, private jet and megayacht travel, and entrance to rarified clubs.
Sam Alito is also on the gravy train, and there are questions about how Brett Kavanaugh managed to pay off his credit cards and gambling debts. John Roberts’ wife has made over $10 million from law firms with business before the court; Neil Gorsuch got a sweetheart real estate deal; Amy Coney Barrett refuses to recuse herself from cases involving her father’s oil company.
None of this is illegal because when five corrupt Republicans on the Court legalized members of Congress taking bribes they legalized that same behavior for themselves.
As a result, we have oligarchs running our media, social media, and buying our elections, while the Supreme Court, with Citizens United, even legalized foreign interference in our political process.
Our modern era of big money controlling government began in the decade after Richard Nixon put Lewis Powell — the tobacco lawyer who wrote the infamous 1971 “Powell Memo” outlining how billionaires and corporations could take over America — on the Supreme Court in 1972.
In the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Court ruled that money used to buy elections wasn’t just cash: they claimed it’s also “free speech” protected by the First Amendment that guarantees your right to speak out on political issues.
In the 200 preceding years — all the way back to the American Revolution of 1776 — no politician or credible political scientist had ever proposed that spending billions to buy votes with dishonest advertising was anything other than simple corruption.
The “originalists” on the Supreme Court, however, claimed to be channeling the Founders of this nation, particularly those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, when they said that “money is the same thing as free speech.” In that claim, Republicans on the Court were lying through their teeth.
In a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, President and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson explicitly laid it out:
“Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government.”
But Republicans on the Supreme Court weren’t reading the Founders. They were instead listening to the billionaires who helped get them on the Court in the first place. Who had bribed them with position and power and then kept them in their thrall with luxury vacations, “friendship,” and gifts.
Two years after the 1976 Buckley decision, the Republicans on the Supreme Court struck again, this time adding that the “money is speech and can be used to buy votes and politicians” argument applied to corporate “persons” as well as to billionaires. Lewis Powell himself wrote the majority opinion in the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision.
Justices White, Brennan, and Marshall dissented:
“The special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only our economy but the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.”
But the dissenters lost the vote, and political corruption of everything from local elections to the Supreme Court itself was now virtually assured.
Notice that ruling came down just two years before the Reagan Revolution, when almost all forward progress in America came to a screeching halt.
It’s no coincidence.
And it’s gotten worse since then, with the Court doubling down in 2010 with Citizens United, overturning hundreds of state and federal “good government” laws dating all the way back to the late 1800s.
Thus, today America has a severe problem of big money controlling our political system. And last night it hit its peak, putting an open fascist in charge of our government.
No other developed country in the world has this problem, which is why every other developed country has a national healthcare system, free or near-free college, and strong unions that maintain a healthy middle class. It’s why they can afford pharmaceuticals, are taking active steps to stop climate change, and don’t fear being shot when they go to school, the theater, or shopping.
It’s why they are still functioning democracies.
The ability of America to move forward on any of these issues is, for now, paralyzed with the election of Trump and the GOP taking over the Senate.
This is not the end, though; hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal.
Many Americans will continue to speak out and fight for a democracy uncorrupted by the morbidly rich.
And so will I.
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