As Climate Doom Looms, We're Drilling For More Fossil Fuels Than Ever Before

"Governments are literally doubling down on fossil fuel production."

Drill, Baby, Drill

A new United Nations report has found that despite promises to cut back, the world's top oil producers are on track to drill for more fossil fuels than ever before.

Fittingly titled the "Production Gap Report," this new UN climate report calls out the continued — and hypocritical — push to drill for fossil fuels by countries including the United States, Russia and Saudi Arabia, despite public promises to the contrary.

"Governments are literally doubling down on fossil fuel production; that spells double trouble for people and planet," UN secretary-general António Guterres said in a press release announcing the report.

For a long time now, it has been abundantly clear that new fossil fuel drilling is antithetical to reducing carbon emissions — because, obviously, cutting back on the source of the emissions is by far the most effective tactic.

Matters of State

All the same, so-called "petrostates," or those reliant on oil like the United States, will by 2030 have drilled for more fossil fuels than ever before, this latest UN report predicts. The top 2o oil producers in the world are also expected, per their own stated plans, to generate more than double the amount deemed safe by the end of this decade, highlighting the widening gap between those countries' co-signed goals and our jarring realities.

Of those top 20 oil-producing countries, which also includes India, Brazil, and Canada, 17 had made net-zero emissions pledges that they're clearly not honoring, the report indicates.

There have, however, been four countries — the United Kingdom, Norway, Germany, and, curiously, China — whose emissions will fall if they continue with their current plans, the PGR predicts. Shout out to those guys!

Bad for Business

As one of the world's top alarm ringers regarding the dangers of unmitigated oil production and usage, the UN is clearly chagrined at these findings, which do seem to jibe with the general observation that promises to move towards less-polluting energy alternatives in hopes of heading off the worst of climate change have been empty.

Beyond being very bad for the environment, experts also argue that continuing to rely on fossil fuels, which are infamously finite, is bad business, too.

"Despite their climate promises, governments’ plan on [plowing] yet more money into a dirty, dying industry, while opportunities abound in a flourishing clean energy sector," Neil Grant, one of the PGR's authors and an expert at the Climate Analytics think tank, told The Guardian. "On top of economic insanity, it is a climate disaster of our own making."

We're not captains of industry here at Futurism, but it does indeed seem like doubling one's investment in a finite resource that also happens to be strangling the planet alive doesn't make the best business sense, either.

More on climate disaster: Global Warming is Even Worse Than We Thought, Scientists Say