Climate action: why are we increasing emissions instead of reducing them?

The Biden administration's approval of the Willow Project, an $8 billion oil investment in Alaska, was met with backlash from environmentalists. According to The New York Times, many accused the US of "betraying" its pledge to move away from fossil fuels.

However, according to information by Rystad Energy and collected by The New York Times, Willow is not rare: it is only a fraction of hundreds of new oil and gas extraction projects approved in the past year worldwide.

Investment in the fossil fuel industries has remained strong. The biggest extraction project for 2022 and 2023, as shown in The New York Times article, is expected to produce around 8 billion barrels of oil in one of the wealthiest countries: Qatar.

The article explains that the industry "has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels of growth," and demand for fossil fuel energies is rising. According to information by Our World in Data, there was a peak in 2019 and stabilized in 2020 and 2021.

The top 30 countries with 2022-2023 oil projects sum hundreds of billions of new oil barrels. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, United Arab Emirates, and Norway have the most significant investments. Only the top five countries combined will produce around 20 billion barrels of oil.

According to information by Our World in Data, the energy produced by fossil fuels has continued to increase. Coal and Gas energy has bounced back, or exceeded, pre-pandemic levels and oil energy is also on that path.

In the last five years, between 2018 and 2023, emissions have increased instead of decreasing, despite warnings from the scientific community. "The pace and scale of what has been done so far, and current plans, are insufficient to tackle climate change," said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report for 2023.

Global organizations like the IPCC and the World Bank have called for more investment in sustainable energies and climate change mitigation. Compared to the resources deployed for large oil projects like Willow, the money destined to fix the problem falls short.

The IPCC experts insisted, in their 2023 report, that there is "sufficient global capital to reduce greenhouse gas emissions if existing barriers are rapidly reduced." However, financing must significantly increase in the next decade.

But more than the investment is needed. Exploitation needs to stop too. The IPCC claims that to maintain a temperature rise below 2.7°, more than 80% of coal, 50% of gas, and 30% of oil reserves cannot be burned.

The IPCC also calculated that we must cut emissions in the next seven years to avoid exceeding the limit 2.7° increase in temperature. The experts called for "deep, rapid and sustained greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors."

The planet is already experiencing a 2.0 ° F temperature rise, as shown in the IPCC report, and the consequences are already visible. Some climate impacts are already so severe we cannot adapt, leading to losses and damages.

Extreme weather is already making some countries and territories difficult to inhabit. "In the last decade, deaths from floods, droughts, and storms were 15 times higher in highly vulnerable regions," said Aditi Mukherji, one of the 93 authors of the report, in a press release by the IPCC.

However, that production model has also proven to be a problem for the long-term sustainability of the economy, according to a report by the World Bank. The document suggested that investment in sustainable sectors is one of three key actions that could increase growth in the next decade.

The World Bank insisted that boosting sustainable investment is essential for the economy's well-being. It called to eliminate restrictions on access to environmentally friendly goods and services and bias toward carbon-intensive assets.

The World Bank is concerned that short-term sight in some policies might land the global economy into a "lost decade," with growth decreasing to previously unseen speeds.

The scenario puts the planet's future in economic and environmental uncertainty. There may be better ways to change that tendency than increasing oil and coil production.