Oil & Gas

The Fact Sheet unpacks why petrochemicals can no longer be relied on as a growth engine. Despite mounting evidence of structural overcapacity, erratic demand, and falling margins, capacity additions continue across regions, especially in Asia-Pacific.

This report exposes how some of the world’s largest petrochemicalcompanies are expanding production while flooding the treaty negotiationswith hundreds of lobbyists in an effort to weaken ambition and shiftattention onto false solutions like chemical recycling.

The oil, gas, and petrochemical industry wields substantial power in both the climate and plastics treaty negotiations, and has used that power to stymie progress in both. Rather than repeat the failures of the climate negotiations, plastics negotiators should seek to create a “plastics club” for ambitious action. 

The report exposes the climate footprint of the planned petrochemical buildout in America. It identifies the most climate-damaging projects and products, demonstrates carbon capture’s inability to significantly mitigate emissions, and uncovers how taxpayers are being misled into funding polluting projects sold as ‘climate solutions.’ 

The Chinese online fashion brand SHEIN has promoted fast fashion to ultra fast fashion. It’s built on the exploitation of the environment and people, relying on the lack of enforcement of protection regulations for the environment as well as workers and consumers.

This investigation underscores the pivotal role the fashion industry plays in perpetuating fossil fuel dependency and signals a concerning lack of action to break ties with Russian oil – through which the fashion brands are indirectly funding petrochemical expansion and the war in Ukraine.

Global fashion brands are promoting circularity, but in reality that's still a myth. Nowhere is the failure of fast fashion more visible than in the countries where many of these cheap clothes end up: on huge dump sites, burnt on open fires, along riverbeds and washed out into the sea, with severe consequences for people and the planet.

The report shows how Big Oil and the plastics industry have deceptively promoted recycling as a solution to plastic waste management for more than 50 years, despite their long-standing knowledge that plastic recycling is not technically or economically viable at scale.