Fossil fuel phase-out

• 1. Introduction

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  Fossil fuel phase-out is the proposed gradual global reduction of the use and production of fossil fuels all the way to zero. As of 2024, global use of fossil fuels is still increasing, continuing a trend that stretches back to at least 1965. Fossil fuels still provide over 80% of the world's primary energy, a share that has proven stubbornly resistant to change. Coal, oil, and natural gas each present their own challenges and their own stubborn constituencies. So how did the world arrive at a moment where 60 nations gather in Colombia to plan a phase-out while deliberately leaving the United States out of the room? What would it actually take to stop burning these fuels? And who stands to win, and who stands to lose, if the transition ever happens at scale?

• 2. The Weight of Coal

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  Coal supplied over a quarter of the world's primary energy and about 40% of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. To meet the Paris Agreement target of keeping warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, coal use would need to halve between 2020 and 2030. In 2019, the UN Secretary General said countries should stop building new coal power plants from 2020 or face what he called "total disaster." In 2020, globally more coal power was retired than built, which looked like progress. But the countries that use the most coal have not joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance, and some continue to build and finance new coal-fired power stations. A 2018 study in the journal Nature Energy suggested that 10 countries in Europe could phase out coal-fired electricity entirely using their existing infrastructure, while the United States and Russia could phase out at least 30%. A just transition away from coal is supported by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and China has pledged carbon neutrality by 2060, a shift that would require transitioning over 3 million workers in the coal-mining and power industry.

• 3. Oil, Gas, and the Bridge That Wasn't

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  Natural gas carries an emission intensity of about 500 grams per kilowatt-hour, and in several countries it has been treated as a temporary bridge fuel to replace coal before renewables take over. The problem is the timescale. The average gas plant life is 35 years, meaning a gas-fired power station built in the 2020s could still be operating in 2050 or beyond. Some investors are already concerned about the reputational risk attached to those assets. Oil presents a different kind of complexity. The extraction and refining of oil from Venezuela or Canada is roughly twice as polluting as the average barrel from Saudi Arabia, which means that for any future net-zero pathway, phasing out the highest-carbon-intensity deposits first could save gigatons of carbon dioxide beyond the reductions that come from simply using less oil. OPEC has called one major phase-out plan from the IISD a fantasy, while a 2016 report by Oil Change International found that the carbon already embedded in currently working mines and fields would push the world just past the 2 degrees Celsius limit from the 2015 Paris Agreement.

• 4. Health, Money, and Hidden Costs

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  An estimated 3.5 million people die prematurely every year from air pollution tied to fossil fuels, according to one estimate putting the proportion of fossil-fuel-related deaths at 65% of all air pollution fatalities. Professor Sir Andy Haines at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has argued that the health benefits of phasing out fossil fuels, measured in economic terms using country-specific values of life, substantially outweigh the cost of achieving the Paris 2 degrees Celsius goal. The financial architecture propping up fossil fuels is enormous. In 2019, direct consumption subsidies alone totalled US$320 billion across many countries. Using a broader definition that includes failing to price greenhouse gas emissions, the International Monetary Fund estimated total fossil fuel subsidies at $5.2 trillion in 2017, equivalent to 6.4% of global GDP. The IMF estimated in 2023 that removing fossil fuel subsidies would be sufficient to limit global heating to well below 2 degrees Celsius. One complication is carbon leakage: removing a subsidy from an energy-intensive industry can shift production to a country with weaker regulation, potentially raising global emissions even as domestic ones fall.

• 5. Energy Independence as a Driver

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  Switzerland electrified virtually its entire railway network during the twentieth century, and the decision was made partly in light of the two world wars. As a neutral country, Switzerland found coal imports increasingly difficult during both conflicts. Because Switzerland has ample hydropower resources, electric trains could run on domestic energy, cutting reliance on imported coal. The 1973 oil crisis pushed energy policy shifts in several directions. France announced an ambitious nuclear expansion program that, by the end of the 1980s, had shifted the country's electricity sector almost entirely away from coal, gas, and oil. In the Netherlands and Denmark, the oil crisis coincided with a trend toward cycling, aimed in part at reducing oil imports in transportation. These historical episodes show that energy independence, not only climate concern, has repeatedly driven transitions away from fossil fuels. The GeGaLo index of geopolitical gains and losses, which assesses how 156 countries' geopolitical positions might shift under full renewable transition, expects former fossil fuel exporters to lose power while former importers and countries rich in renewable resources would strengthen their positions.

• 6. International Diplomacy and the Colombia Conference

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  In April 2026, the first International Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels was held in Santa Marta, Colombia, co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands, with 57 countries participating. Participating countries generate about one-third of global economic activity, and almost all are democracies. Representatives from indigenous groups, civil society, youth, and subnational authorities including California also took part. The United States was deliberately excluded, following a U.S. policy shift favoring fossil fuel energy over green initiatives, including refunding licence fees to firms that cancel offshore wind projects. At the COP27 summit in Egypt, Saudi Arabian representatives had pushed to block any call for the world to burn less oil, and the final statement failed to include a phase-out call after objections from Saudi Arabia and a few other oil producers. In March 2022, at a United Nations meeting with climate scientists, Saudi Arabia and Russia together pushed to delete a reference to "human-induced climate change" from an official document. The International Energy Agency estimates that reaching carbon neutrality by mid-century would require global renewable energy investment to triple by 2030, reaching over $4 trillion annually.

• 7. What the Science Says

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  A September 2021 study provided the first scientific assessment of the minimum share of fossil fuels that would need to stay in the ground per region and globally to allow a 50% probability of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050. To achieve that 1.5 degree goal, the vast majority of fossil fuel reserves owned by countries and companies as of 2021 would have to remain unextracted. The Fossil Fuel Cuts Database, compiled in 2020, gave the first global account of supply-side initiatives to constrain production, recording 1,967 initiatives implemented between 1988 and October 2021 across 110 countries. Divestment accounted for the largest category with 1,201 initiatives, followed by blockades at 374 and litigation at 192. A 2022 investigation found that big fossil fuel firms continue to plan large investments in new production projects that would push warming past internationally agreed temperature limits. In June 2021, researchers from the University of Technology Sydney published a report concluding that every region on Earth can replace fossil fuels with renewable energy to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius and still provide reliable energy access to all, though the International Energy Agency noted in 2020 that the pace of phase-out would need to move four times faster than it had been going.