'The Production Gap' Report 2025

Climate think tankers are out in strength denouncing the world's renewed investment in fossil fuels

We’ve discussed the problems deriving from what’s commonly referred to as Hubbert’s Peak, or Peak Oil, in early summer:

Peak Oil in Norway

Back then, Norway was fine continuing to fund the exploitation of its hydrocarbon energy resources, and a new report™ finds that Oslo isn’t alone.

Problem is, that the identified ‘Production Gap’—understood as ‘excess production’ above the emissions targets envisioned in the 2015 Paris Agreement, is misunderstood I think: take away the production to meet these targets means, in effect, to halve the consumption of fossil fuels worldwide within the next five years until 2030.

Doing so will result in billions of people dying (as most food is produced with fossil fuel inputs, and organic agriculture cannot feed 8+ billion people), but since these consequences are left out of the report, its authors and influence-peddlers get to sleep well, I presume.

Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.

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New Report: World Plans Sharp Increase in Oil, Gas, and Coal Production

‘All countries have a good reason to continue using fossil fuels’, says researcher.

By Kristian Elster and Kristine Ramberg Aasen, NRK, 22 Sept. 2025 [source; archived]

The world plans to extract more than twice as much fossil fuel as is compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees [note that this is non-falsifiable hypothesis, and since the Science™ cannot empirically test it, well, it’s more of an article of faith than anything else; I’m all for erring on the safe side, but the presentation of this statement in the first sentence of what purports to be a news item is—agenda-setting; oh, lest I forget, the whole part of ‘above pre-industrial levels’ is missing: why?].

This is according to a report released by the Stockholm Environment Institute on Monday [21 Sept. 2025; we’ll look at that report below the news item].

The report—called The Production Gap—shows the gap between planned production of fossil fuels and the level needed to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement [a few things: yes, that report™ is called that—but there’s no imprint or ‘about us’ section on their website; there are a few partners: Stockhold Environment Institute (set up by the Swedish gov’t in 1988, with about 40% of its funding coming from the Swedish gov’t and another 40% from undisclosed ‘other sources’, with a sizeable share of other funders, such as the gov’ts of Austrialia, the UK, Norway, etc.; the Int’l Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), a Canada-based charity founded in, believe it or not, 1988 whose funders similarly the entire caste of usual suspects; and the Berlin-based Climate Analytics LLC (GmbH) that has a shorter history (their annual reports go back all the way to 2016), it is inextricably tied to several German gov’t agencies and the rest of the usual suspects, as their 2016 annual report shows].

[I’ll open a separate comment here as that’s not only what the Production Gap Report 2025 shows, and I’ll draw your attention to the one big image on top of the linked page that reveals all there is to know what this is all about:

I’ve added these green arrows to help you see what these shady characters desire: it’s late September 2025, and within the next five (!!!) years, Western gov’ts, the UN, the World Bank, and their camp followers desire to cut fossil fuel production by about 50%. Let that sink in, for it means—mass starvation (most food is produced with massive inputs of fossil energy for both diesel fuel and artificial fertilisers); I submit that cutting fossil fuel production in half within five (!!!) years is tantamount to culling probably more than 50% of the world’s human population within that timeframe.

This is also why, in all likelihood, it won’t happen: too much future investment has been committed, which oil & gas companies won’t simply write off; all gov’ts will fall well before 2030 if they implemented even a fraction of the policies required to accompany these insane aims; and then there’s the entire shitshow masquerading ersatz products (fake food™, eat ze bugs, etc.), for which I suppose ‘Soylent Green’ serves as an apt reference.

The only way the above is even half-way conceivable, in my view, is if Peak Oil is real, imminent/already well-underway, and this and other comparable reports are merely predictive programming of a particularly insidious kind (but note that, as the human population goes down, the entire premise of peak oil—and the problem of growing production further—changes as fewer people equals more hydrocarbon energy per capita becomes available.]

Despite what is known about climate change, the report shows that there will be an increase in the production of oil, coal, and gas in the years ahead [that is a problematic hypothesis, too, for it means, in simple terms, that the entire Peak Oil—and the scarcity it implies—may be wrong? Hence the inevitable question: is the so-called ‘Production Gap’, and perhaps ‘Climate Change’, too, not much more than a propaganda ruse by the powers-that-be to mask/cover up the greatest mismanagement of all time?].

These are dramatic figures. We are in the middle of a climate crisis and yet fossil fuel producers are planning to produce 120% more fossil fuels than their carbon budgets allow.

This is according to Karoline Andaur, Secretary General of the World Wildlife Fund WWF.

Although the figures show a sharp increase, Cicero [another ‘think tank’ affiliated, of course, with the U of Oslo, whose employees write about fascinating insights, such as the apparent fact that less air pollution drives global warming (we’ve seen this also with ocean-going ships back in 2023)] researcher Solveig Aamodt¹ is not surprised:

With the increasing trade war and focus on many other things than climate, it is not very surprising that we are not taking a big step in the right direction.

Norway On the Lists

The report looks at the 20 largest producers of oil, gas, and coal.

Norway is among the countries on the lists. In 2022, Norway was the world’s 10th largest producer of oil. When it comes to gas, Norway was the world’s 7th largest.

Compared to 2023, today’s plans are for more production. Coal production is planned to increase until 2035, and both oil and gas production will continue to rise until 2050.

• Of the world’s 16 largest oil producers, 12 will increase production.

• Of the world’s 18 largest gas producers, 15 will increase production.

Arguing For One’s Own Country

Solveig Aamodt says that the Norwegian government, both this one and the previous one, has many arguments for why Norway should engage in oil and gas production.

She points out that Norway argues that we have environmentally friendly oil [that’s a Very Serious Person™ making that claim, by the way]. At the same time, India, which produces and uses a lot of coal, has arguments that they have very low emissions and energy consumption per person.

‘They believe that there are much better arguments for them to be able to use coal than that already rich countries make money from oil’, says Aamodt [ah, rules for thee, that’s the name of the game].

‘All countries have, according to themselves, a good reason to continue with fossil energy’, she summarises.

‘Singing one last tune’

This summer, the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a statement that it could be ‘an internationally illegal act’ not to limit the increase in the production of fossil fuels.

The ICJ believed that this could trigger liability for damages for countries that extract coal, oil, and gas [now that would be ‘fun’, isn’t it? Just imagine, as I said before, that fossil fuels go away, and I guarantee you that your imagination will not be pleasant].

Former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres writes in the foreword to the report that ‘the fossil fuel industry is singing its last tune, and they know it’. [Ms. Figueres, incidentally, although unmentioned here, is also affiliated with the Production Gap Report].

Figueres assumes that the world is in the process of transitioning to greener energy sources [maybe, maybe not, but the point here is—at what price?], but Andaur at WWF believes that the report shows how wrong things can be:

We risk locking ourselves into emissions from new oil, gas and coal projects for many decades to come, which will steer the world into a complete climate collapse.

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Bottom Lines: Boondoggle Galore

At this junction, the above-related news item simply stops. There’s nothing there but the ultimate discussion-and-thinking-stopper: the claim of this or that being not merely a fact but the Truth™, and everyone who stops and thinks for a moment is, of course, wrong. Or worse.

Yet, if we consider the available facts as we know it, here’s the sad absurdity as I see it:

• ‘Peak Oil’ (as a catch-all) concept may or may not be true, but whatever it is, it’s a moving target: we’d have to factor in current demand, projected future demand, technological possibilities (‘ultimately recoverable oil’), and future tech, population size, standards of living, etc.

• And that all (and then some) must be considered before we think about all the uses of hydrocarbon energy, in particular for fuel, food production, and virtually everything else humans do.

If the extraction of hydrocarbon energy, widely understood, goes down, we’re looking at massive dislocations in terms of food production and distribution, to say nothing about spiking prices for everything.

And well before anything like this happens, investors are pulling funding for exploration projects that take up to a decade and countless billions of dollars to develop (Norway’s last major gas find took 9 years from discovery to the first sales).

Hence, here is my business cycle commentary about what the above-related report indicates: 10 years ago, following the Paris Agreement, investors withheld some money and funnelled it into other projects; 10 years on (today), investors see that, compared to the Green™ Energy Transition boondoggles, hydrocarbons pay better.

Here’s from the ‘Production Gap 2025’ report:

Taken together, government [sic] now plan even higher levels of coal production to 2035, and gas production to 2050, than they did in 2023. Planned oil production continues to increase to 2050. These plans undermine countries’ Paris Agreement commitments, and go against expectations that under current policies global demand for coal, oil, and gas will peak before 2030.

The increases in fossil fuel production estimated under the government plans and projections pathways would lead to global production levels in 2030 that are 500%, 31%, and 92% higher for coal, oil, and gas, respectively, than the median 1.5ºC-con­sistent pathway. These plans and projections also collectively exceed the fossil fuel production implied by countries’ own climate mitigation pledges by 35% in 2030 and 141% in 2050.

The main problem, as far as I see it, isn’t gov’t planning (which is a chief problem of many of the ills in our lives); it’s the question of these production increases’ feasibility, or, are there that much fossil fuel reserves left?

I, for one, am skeptical, for this doesn’t simply require the actual availability of untapped reserves that are recoverable at whatever prices in the future; it also requires tons of money (and then some), which I doubt will be ‘there’, esp. as gov’ts are inching ever closer to a hot war (which is also sustainable™, of course).

In the final analysis, I’d propose the following resolution to this conundrum:

What reports like the ‘Production Gap 2025’ are—is they are the manifestations (cover story) for the biggest planning failure of all time: wherever one stands on the origins of fossil fuels or its presumed extraction maximum (‘peak oil’), the main issue is this:

Gov’ts have been planning for the reduction of fossil fuel production for decades (see the ‘Earth Summit’ and its preparatory work), yet gov’t planners failed to come up with anything that’s both feasible and scale-able to replace fossil fuels.

What the ‘Production Gap’—understood by its authors as ‘excess production’ above the 1.5 degrees target agreed on in Paris a decade ago—means, then is the gap (really: a chasm) between wishful thinking vs. reality.

And that reality is starkly different however one considers the problem of environmental degradation: lowering the production and utilisation of fossil fuels means reducing the human population.

In this, the purported Science™ of ‘Climate Change’ is nothing short but a discursive, if not paradigmatic, shift of the scientific method:

'Climate Change' as 'Paradigm Shift'

Change the words we use, change the thoughts we have.

And deflect the anger away from those who brought you this predicament: big gov’t planning, undertaken in cahoots with big business.

Both must go.

1. Let’s merely note that Solveig Aamodt holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (sic) ‘focusing on climate policy processes in India and Latin America’ while, according to her Cicero profile, she works on the following issues:

Energy policy in the EU; Energy policy in Norway; International climate policy; EU climate policy; Norwegian climate policy

Note the discrepancy between her credentials vs. her expertise™, but if you’re with the right™ institution, you can pull it off.