The sector’s main oil and gasoline firms declare they’re main the power transition. They spend billions on PR to emblem themselves as a part of the answer. The information we’ve reviewed tells a unique tale.
The place a fast transition to renewables is happening, incumbent fossil gasoline corporations have nearly not anything to do with it. Research by means of considered one of us displays that the biggest 250 oil and gasoline firms handiest personal 1.42% of world renewable power, and simply 0.01% of the power they extract comes from renewable assets.
For many years, many Indigenous peoples and environmental activists have accused the fossil gasoline business of providing “false solutions”. Those are tasks that enlarge the business’s inexperienced credentials whilst leaving its core trade fashion untouched. Our analysis helps their case.
We argue that fossil gasoline firms’ deployment of renewable power, biofuels, carbon seize and garage (CCS), inexperienced hydrogen and carbon offsetting isn’t designed to oppose decarbonisation, however to regulate the dialog round renewables. False answers sign compliance whilst serving to to mute requires a systemic transformation.
Mapping the lengthen
Drawing at the World Atlas of Environmental Justice, the arena’s biggest environmental struggle database primarily based on the Independent College of Barcelona, we mapped and analysed 48 tasks run by means of fossil gasoline corporations. Those ranged from biofuels to CCS and woodland recovery schemes, in addition to some renewable power tasks which can be owned and utilized by those corporations.
The 48 tasks the authors assessed.
Llavero-Pasquina et al
Crucially, we discovered that those have been hardly ever displacing fossil fuels. As an alternative, they justify additional use of oil, gasoline or coal.
As an example, CCS amenities are frequently related to “enhanced oil recovery”. That comes to CO₂ captured from an influence plant or manufacturing unit being injected into wells to squeeze out extra fossil fuels from underground reservoirs – an means that in fact extends the lifespan of oil fields. The business’s personal paperwork again this up: the World CCS Institute’s 2025 standing document lists 77 commercially amenities in operation around the globe. Of those, it notes 33 have been evolved to support oil restoration.
Likewise, “clean hydrogen” is frequently used to greenwash tasks which can be in fact constructed on persisted gasoline manufacturing. Even renewables can grow to be false answers. We discovered sun and wind farms constructed particularly to energy refineries and oil and gasoline drilling. Those tasks don’t decarbonise the grid, they only make it more uncomplicated and less expensive to extract fossil fuels.
New tech, previous injustices
False answers do greater than lock in fossil gasoline dependence. Around the 48 instances there have been examples of land conflicts. Carbon offset schemes frequently contain prime emitters paying to offer protection to or repair a woodland or different ecosystem, to “make up” for his or her emissions. However in follow, they are able to result in the enclosure of up to now not unusual land and the lack of communal or Indigenous rights. Biofuel plantations can displace smallholders, changing native meals techniques with industrial-scale farms.
Indigenous and standard communities are disproportionately suffering from false answers. Many tasks are sited on ancestral or sacred land with out significant session or consent.
Resistance to those tasks is frequently framed by means of the fossil gasoline business and its supporters as hostility to local weather motion or a type of nimbyism. However our knowledge means that, in lots of instances, those communities are adverse to tasks that perpetuate the fossil gasoline economic system.
We additionally discovered proof of governments channelling public subsidies to fund many of those tasks. Such instances quantity to an instantaneous money switch from taxpayers to personal firms for guarantees that ship minimum emissions discounts.
They’re, due to this fact, in impact serving to to lengthen the top of the fossil gasoline generation.
But those tasks have enabled politicians to say they’re local weather leaders with no need to confront a formidable business.
After analyzing those 48 conflicts, one lesson turns into unmistakable: false answers don’t seem to be experimental missteps. They’re in impact serving to to lengthen the top of the fossil gasoline generation.
