With oil majors abandoning climate targets and politicians friendly to their interests capturing power, Andrew Simms looks at how SGR’s campaigning history inadvertently sparked an idea, developed jointly with Prof. Peter Newell, a keynote speaker at SGR’s Responsible Science conference, that informed and framed a major international campaign for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Article from Responsible Science journal, no. 7, May 2025. Published online 9 Sept 2025.
The year 2018 was highly eventful, but is already slowly slipping behind the fog of upheavals since - from a pandemic to the rise of the extreme political right and a deluge of war crimes committed from the Ukraine to Gaza. But significant things happened in 2018 to recalibrate targets for climate action and suggest an additional mechanism for meeting them that could, still, enable meaningful, progressive change.
It was the year the IPCC published its special report saying that a 1.5°C, not 2°C degrees average global surface temperature rise should, for safety, be the maximum permitted. Staying within that boundary, it said ‘would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.’
By coincidence, around the same time in late 2018, we launched the Rapid Transition Alliance, a network of civil society organisations committed to making action happen at the speed and scale demanded by climate science. The Alliance’s motto is ‘evidence-based hope’ and, to map the conditions under which rapid change can happen, it gathered real world examples of transition showing the human and technological potential to pivot quickly, and summarised lessons that might be applied more broadly.
As a result I was hunting hawkishly for relevant current case studies and historical precedents of when things move fast in the right direction. In 2017, before I became the organisation’s Assistant Director, Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR) was part of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its work to bring about the UN Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). This work on nuclear weapons control meant I was acutely aware that 2018 was also the 50th anniversary of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which opened for signatures in 1968, at the height of the Cold War, after less than three years of formal negotiation. Here was a good example, I thought, of how the international community can move fast even - or especially when - the political situation is extremely hostile between key nations.
An idea occurs
Then, one evening in a South London pub, I was talking with my friend and collaborator in the Rapid Transition Alliance, Prof. Peter Newell, lamenting the state of climate inaction. There was the fact that famously, and weirdly, fossil fuels themselves as a fuel source went unaddressed in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the subsequent Paris Agreement which was negotiated at annual meetings of the Conference of the Parties (COP). Shockingly, coal, oil and gas are not even mentioned. Also, the then upcoming COP 24 in Katowice, Poland, was sponsored by the nation’s leading coal producer, JSW. Conversation quickly turned to why we couldn’t have a fossil fuel equivalent of the NPT? Civil society had long discussed the need to leave fossil fuels in the ground and spoken about unburnable carbon. The potentially stranded assets of companies invested in fossil fuels were also being used to encourage divestment. And regional agreements, for example to end coal development, had been floated. But had anyone posited a ‘Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty’ that learned from some of the lessons of the NPT, and drew on its three pillar structure to prohibit further fossil fuel expansion (non-proliferation), roll back existing fossil fuel infrastructures (disarmament), and support countries in a just transition away from fossil fuels (peaceful use)?
We checked and, not finding anything, made the proposal ‘We need a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty’ in The Guardian on 23 October 2018. After this produced some lively debate, the same paper later published a letter supporting the idea signed by leading public figures like Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Caroline Lucas and the heads of several major environmental groups. We followed this up with a more detailed consideration of what the treaty might look like in a 2019 journal article in Climate Policy, and continued to explore questions of practical implementation in workshops and through analysis of potential pathways and elements of the treaty.
With our meagre resources and full workload at the time, what we couldn’t have imagined back then was how the proposal would be transformed by the campaigning zeal and fundraising ability of the dynamic Tzeporah Berman, founder of Stand.earth and a long-standing campaigner on fossil fuels. Pulling in people and resources from around the world she grew a huge, dynamic campaign around the proposal. At the time of writing, in addition to thousands of individuals, organisations and municipalities, an increasing group of 16 countries are now looking for a mandate to negotiate a treaty.
Keeping fossil fuels in the ground
The Treaty is part of what Prof Peter Newell described to SGR as a ‘rising tide of supply side policies’ to keep fossil fuels in the ground, including bans, moratoria and phase-out policies, subsidy removal, controls on finance flowing into the sector, or ‘any tool seeking to limit the extraction and production of fossil fuels’. A tracker of such policies finds over 1,800 of them around the world today. Such policies are needed because research suggests that governments currently are set to allow 110% more production of fossil fuels in 2030 than would be compatible with the 1.5C target of the Paris Agreement. This is known as the ‘production gap’.
In addition to the Treaty initiative are other groups such as the Powering Past Coal Alliance and the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance. Given how fossil fuel overproduction is now being discussed, it seems that the parallels between the original NPT and the proposal for a fossil fuel equivalent are increasingly strong. We called SGR’s 2024 Responsible Science conference, ‘Defusing Carbon Bombs’. ‘Carbon bombs’ are fossil fuel extraction projects that will generate more than one gigatonne of CO₂ (1 GtCO₂) over their remaining lifetime. The immense destructive force these carry for the environmental conditions needed to sustain humanity and much of nature can appropriately be compared with the impact of nuclear weapons. In fact, back in 2015, Baroness Joyce Anelay, a minister of state at the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), said that climate change should be assessed in the same comprehensive way as nuclear weapons proliferation.
The greenhouse gas pollution of a carbon bomb is equal to the emissions from 233 million gasoline powered cars driven for a year – or, if such a thing is even imaginable, 80 trillion smart phone charges. Carbon bombs represent currently the 425 largest fossil fuel projects, but are only around 45% of oil and gas extraction projects and 25% for coal, of the entire fossil fuel extraction sector. Carbon bombs are set to consume twice the remaining 1.5°C carbon budget.
The three pillars of a non-proliferation treaty
The Fossil Treaty initiative has learned from the experience of the campaign for the TPNW, which itself sought to correct weaknesses in the original NPT. But the three basic principles, or pillars, of that early treaty, negotiated so quickly, speak strongly to what is needed to keep coal, oil and gas in the ground.
The first is ‘non proliferation’ itself, the task of preventing further lock-in of fossil fuel dependence and which is used to justify new exploration and production. The first step in the nuclear treaty process was a stock take of who had what weapons. The work on carbon bombs and the production gap is part of the process to assess those fossil fuel reserves which, if burned, would carry us across the 1.5°C warming line. More ways are needed of monitoring their non-use and scrutinising any policy measures likely to lead to the proliferation of fossil fuels – such as allowing the promotion and rise of gasoline hungry SUVs and aviation expansion.
The second pillar of the NPT is disarmament. In the context of the climate crisis, this can be interpreted as the managed decommissioning of fossil fuel infrastructure and its rapid substitution with clean energy. ‘Disarmament’ could also be seen as part of delivering the three point plan for action suggested by climate scientists that carry the highest benefits, namely: lowering energy demand, lowering material consumption, and switching to food choices that are low carbon. SGR’s initiative on Fair Lifestyle Targets shows how people can take their own ‘disarmament’ action.
The final pillar concerns the promotion of the ‘peaceful’ use of technology as part of a global just transition. In a climate context, that would mean massively expanding existing initiatives to compensate poorer countries for leaving fossil fuels in the ground, while ensuring access to clean energy and the technology needed for development. Funds could be also redirected from the staggering $13m per minute that governments give in fossil fuel subsidies, according to the International Monetary Fund. As part of our proposal for the treaty, Peter Newell and I suggested a Global Transition Fund that could channel funds from carbon taxes and the redirection of fossil fuel subsidies, for example, to countries wanting to diversify their economies away from fossil fuels.
If it seems a strange geopolitical moment to suggest international cooperation for mutual survival, the same could have been said in the Cold War world of 1965. If any moment is the right one to come together and step back from the march to collective self-destruction, it is the time of greatest peril and need.
________________________
Andrew Simms is Assistant Director of SGR, co-director of the New Weather Institute and, with Prof Peter Newell, first proposed the Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty idea.
Image credit: Citizens Climate Lobby
