Brussels, 23 November, 2020 – The Oil and Gas Methane Partnership (OGMP) which is a Climate and Clean Air Coalition initiative led by the UN Environment Programme with the European Commission and Environmental Defense Fund, today committed to a new framework for monitoring, reporting and reducing methane emissions.
The partnership includes polluters like Shell, BP or Total among its 62 corporate members. On board are also European’s most important fossil gas transmission system operators (TSOs) who have benefited greatly from the EU mega gas infrastructure build-out so far, including from EU tax money thanks to the Project of Common Interest (PCI) label.
Frida Kieninger, Campaigns Officer at Food & Water Action Europe released the following statement:
“The oil and gas industry has routinely and massively underestimated methane emissions associated with drilling in order to sell the bogus narrative that fracking is a cleaner form of fossil fuel extraction, and that fossil gas can be somehow stripped of these climate-wrecking emissions. We cannot waste time on industry-friendly tracking schemes; what we need to do is ban the import of fracked gas and the important emissions that come with it. We need to transition off fossil fuels. We know that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees or even 2 degrees is not possible if Europe continues its dependence on fossil gas. Purely cosmetic changes, like finding new ways to quantify the harms inflicted on our planet by fossil fuel corporations, are a distraction from the most urgent task: We need to ban fracked gas imports and stop the expansion of dirty fossil gas infrastructure before it’s too late.”
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A presentation of the framework on the EU Commission website can be found here.
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Contact: Frida Kieninger – [email protected], +32 487 24 99 05