So in a week defined by high profile announcements, BOGA’s roster might well have been the most important. The major member governments — the current co-chairs Denmark and Costa Rica, as well as France, Greenland, Ireland, Quebec, Sweden and Whales — have pledged to end new concessions, license rounds or lease for oil and gas production and exploration, and to establish a date aligned with Paris to end oil and gas production and exploration within their territorial limits. Associate members California, New Zealand and Portugal have “taken important concrete steps that help reduce oil and gas production,” such as the recent Golden State decision to ban drilling at less than 3,200 feet from homes and schools. As a “friend of BOGA”, Italy pledged to work to help align oil and gas production with the goals of the Paris Agreement. Together, they hope to convene a multilateral process to sort out the details of the energy transition.

Global energy companies “all want to be the last barrel sold,” Tzeporah said of private and public drillers. The Paris Agreement is simply “not designed to negotiate who can produce, how much and where.” And so we need other mechanisms and other negotiations, ”which is why she sees the treaty as a chance for a broader multilateral conversation on how to plan for a just energy transition. For this, net zero commitments, which are based on the hypothetical end-of-line carbon capture, do not cut it. “As long as net zero liabilities allow expansion of fossil fuel production, then they are a fraud,” she told me. “The fossil fuel industry has been successful in convincing policymakers for decades that they can decouple emissions from fossil fuel production.”

Given the structure of the Paris Agreement, changes to phasing out fossil fuels are expected to occur nationally, through nationally determined contributions to limit warming to “well below” of 2 degrees Celsius. Only one part of the agreement – Article 6 – deals with international coordination to reduce emissions, and almost all of it is devoted to building a carbon market that offsets emissions through credits. of carbon. Among the minor victories of COP26 was the establishment of a mechanism to ensure that the market can reduce global emissions, instead of just shifting them. Only one element of Article 6, 6.8, deals with “non-market” approaches such as coordinated public investments and carbon taxes. It remains to be seen how precisely this will be implemented. The Civil Society Equity Review presents several ways in which the UNFCCC could take fossil fuel supply issues more seriously, including adding elements on just transition efforts to the required transparency reporting.

None of the founding members of BOGA was of course a large producer of oil and gas. Its supporters say this shows BOGA is serious. “I think it’s a BOGA success story that hasn’t given in to the temptation to lower the entry bar so more people can rush in, as we’ve seen in several of the announcements. last week, ”said Catherine Abreau, Canada- founder and executive director of climate group Destination Zero, who sits on the steering committee on fossil fuel non-proliferation and helped coordinate BOGA. During the first week of COP26, the UK Presidency eagerly announced that more than 40 countries had agreed to phase out coal by 2030. Only 23 countries on this list made a new pledge, and several did not. use no coal at all. Poland, one of the largest coal producers in Europe, claims after the announcement, he did not understand what he was committing to, claiming he would phase out coal only in the 2040s.