Know Your Oil and Gas: Generating Climate Intelligence to Cut Petroleum Industry Emissions

The oil and gas industry’s emissions reporting lacks sufficient transparency today, especially when it comes to methane emissions. Oil and gas operations have divergent climate intensities that range by a factor of 10. This report offers market actors, policymakers, and the public new climate intelligence to align oil and gas sector greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions with 1.5°C climate goals.

The Know Your Oil and Gas report — along with the accompanying Oil Climate Index plus Gas (OCI+) web tool — analyzes the life-cycle GHG emissions for one-half of the world’s current oil and gas production. Emissions intensities are estimated from …

RE-organizing Power Systems for the Transition

The power sector lies at the heart of the global energy transition, which will rely on increased electrification of end uses and the adoption of variable renewable energy (VRE) such as wind and solar PV as the main sources of electricity; however, today’s power systems embody an era in which generation depended on large centralized and dispatchable power plants. It is therefore essential that power system structures evolve to meet the requirements of the renewable era.

This report aims to inform discussions on the role of power system organizational structures in facilitating and accelerating the energy transition. It explores enablers …

World Energy Investment 2022

This year’s edition of the World Energy Investment report provides a full update on the investment picture in 2021 and full-year estimates of the outlook for 2022. It examines how investors are assessing risks and opportunities across all areas of fuel and electricity supply, critical minerals, efficiency and research and development, against a backdrop of uncertainties over how events will play out in 2022, namely the ongoing war in Ukraine, the outlook for the global economy, and in some countries the continuing public health risks from the pandemic.

The report focuses on some important features of the new investment landscape …

Moving America Forward: Health, Safety, and Economic Benefits of Multimodal Transportation Systems

This paper reviews the connections between transportation, air quality, health, road safety, and economic and social well-being. It also examines best practices and key considerations for equitable
transportation system design. A companion paper, “Investing in Climate-Smart Transportation: An Action Guide for America Is All In Members,” offers specific strategies and case studies for U.S. non- federal actors seeking to realize these benefits for their communities. States, tribes, cities, towns, universities, businesses, and civil society actors can implement these tactics and coordinate action to create positive feedback loops.…

Investing in Climate-Smart Transportation

The United States federal government is deploying billions of dollars to U.S. non- federal actors – states, tribal nations, cities, businesses, and civil society – for transportation-related infrastructure projects through the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). This historic moment coincides with a critical need to reduce carbon emissions at every level of society by at least 50 percent by 2030 relative to 2005. An All-In strategy in transportation can deliver a reduction of roughly 36 percent below 2005 levels.

In addition to reducing emissions, climate- aligned transportation projects deliver numerous non-climate benefits, including improving health, equity, safety, …

Insuring a Nature-Positive World: An Insurers’ Guide to Hydropower

Knowledge of the impacts of hydropower on people and nature is becoming clearer. At the same time, our understanding of its role in achieving an energy sector in line with
limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels is evolving. This guide provides an initial view of actions that insurers can take to protect nature and prevent high-impact hydropower. However, the recommendations will be adjusted over time as knowledge on both these topics develops. WWF welcomes the inputs of insurers as it continues to work on this topic.…

Measuring the Benefits of Power Plant Effluent Regulation

EPA is considering regulations that would clean up the wastewater discharges from power plants, after they were stalled and then rolled back under the Trump administration. As it conducts that analysis, this report urges EPA to provide a robust assessment of the benefits of the regulation, improving on analysis that was conducted in the Obama era. The report reviews the economic framework, literature, and analyses performed to support both the original Obama-era rule and Trump-era revisions, building on Davis Noll and Rothschild (2021), which detailed numerous impacts of the 2020 Rule that EPA neglected to examine. This review highlights …

Methane Gas Leaks: Frequent Leaks are Resulting in Death, Injury and Other Damage to our Health and Environment

Methane gas has heated the homes of many Americans for over a century – and for over a century, it has been prone to leaks, putting communities and the environment in danger. With growing awareness of the impact of methane leaks on the climate, and with growing availability of safer alternatives, it is clear that gas has no place in a modern clean energy network.

The consistent risks posed by gas leaks – coupled with the urgent need to address climate change – mean that the nation should prioritize electrifying buildings while taking immediate, focused actions to address …

Unburnable Carbon: Ten Years On

Over $1 trillion of oil & gas assets risk becoming stranded as a result of policy action on climate and the rise in alternative energy sources.

The majority of this unburnable carbon is held by companies listed in just a handful of global financial centers. 

Unburnable Carbon finds that the majority of embedded emissions are listed on the stock exchanges of China, USA, India, Russia and Saudi Arabia where, with the exception of the USA, emissions are dominated by the partial listings of state-owned companies.…

The Shaky Economics of Gas-Fired Power

Many fossil fuel power plants across the country are no longer economic to operate year-round. Regardless, plant owners continue to burn coal or fossil gas when there are cheaper options—namely renewables—because public utility commissions allow them to charge their customers higher rates to cover their losses.

Midwest utilities and other electricity providers have been running their fossil gas power plants at a loss for the equivalent of three months on average a year. In 2019 alone, even when gas prices were at record lows, utilities in the 20 states covered by two electric grid operators—the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) …