It creates its own set of commitments and investments, its own momentum. All that fossil fuel has to go somewhere. As things stand now, wealthy fossil fuel–producing countries are making grand emission reduction commitments while continuing to ramp up production.

For many of them, the fight against climate change is a fight for places - specific places, with histories, peoples, and ecosystems - and every fossil fuel project is, in some way or another, an assault on a place. Over the last decade, more economists and policy wonks have come around to their way of thinking, questioning both the economics and the sociology of the demand-focused conventional wisdom. We must reduce demand for fossil fuels, the argument goes, otherwise any supply we shut down will just pop up somewhere else.Īctivists have always disagreed with this logic. In this episode, longtime activist Tzeporah Berman discusses the need to track and reduce fossil fuel production (not just consumption) and the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty that she and other activists created to help coordinate those efforts.įull transcript of Volts podcast featuring Tzeporah Berman, July 7, 2021įor as long as I've been covering climate change, it's been conventional wisdom among economists - and the kind of people who aspire to please economists - that the proper focus of climate policy is on demand.

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