October 6, 2022
Washington, DC — Chemical fertilizers derived from fossil fuels (“fossil fertilizers”) are an underrecognized driver of climate change, biodiversity loss, and toxic pollution, and yet the fertilizer industry is increasingly portraying itself as part of the solution to these converging planetary crises. Together with oil and gas companies, agrochemical producers are promoting carbon capture and fossil fuel-derived hydrogen and ammonia to secure additional revenue streams for their business-as-usual production and green their image. A new report released today by the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) reveals how these trends risk deepening reliance on fossil fuels and industrial agriculture precisely when we need to be phasing them out, and push the world further past planetary boundaries to the detriment of ecosystems and human rights.
Fossils, Fertilizers, and False Solutions: How an Industry Push to Launder Fossil Fuels in Agrochemicals Puts the Climate and the Planet at Risk exposes how the fossil fertilizer industry is advancing a new business model that will extend the fossil economy in the midst of a climate emergency. At a time of surging fossil fuel and fertilizer prices and related impacts on food and energy security, the report finds:
- Fossil fertilizers have significant climate impacts all along their life cycle and are major drivers of biodiversity loss and toxic pollution.
- Rather than reducing reliance on these chemicals and transitioning away from the fossil economy, fertilizer companies are promoting the use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) to make fossil gas-based hydrogen and ammonia as inputs for industrial agriculture and as new combustible fuels.
- These risky technologies prolong reliance on fossil fuels on the myth that they can be made “low carbon,” but instead entrench dependence on oil and gas, prop up industries that need to be phased out, and increase harms to people and the planet.
- Efforts to remake fertilizer businesses as “clean energy companies” serve to greenwash polluting operations, cash in on generous new government subsidies for CCS and hydrogen, and expand market access – not solve the climate crisis.
- Fertilizer and fossil fuel companies are operating or actively exploring dozens of new or expanded production facilities in at least nine countries across the world, including projects in eight US states already affected by polluting industries.
- Deep connections and close ties between the fossil fuel and agrochemical industries, including through shared board members, overlapping corporate ownership structures, or agrochemical companies’ direct engagement in fossil fuel production dangerously tether food systems to the fossil economy.
Steven Feit, Senior Attorney and co-author of the report said,
“Fossil fertilizers are both a key target for oil production and the leading edge of the fossil fuel-enabling schemes. The combination of CCS, blue hydrogen, and blue ammonia at the heart of fertilizer and fossil fuel company expansion plans threaten to impede climate action while further entrenching polluting industries and undermining food sovereignty. Governments and the public alike should see through the greenwashing and take action to close these escape hatches for the fossil fuel industry. Anything else will prolong the inevitable and necessary transition from the fossil economy.”
Lili Fuhr, Deputy Director of Climate & Energy and co-author of the report said,
“Fossil fertilizers enable a corporate-controlled model for industrial agriculture that pushes monocultures and high-yields while sending humanity hurtling toward dangerously risky territory. Just like carbon in the atmosphere and microplastics in our soils and waters: fossil fertilizers and pesticides are fossil fuel pollution. Untethering global food production from fossil fuels is essential to advancing both climate justice and food sovereignty. We need to close the oil and gas tab for the agrochemical industry if we truly want to scale up resilient, regenerative models of food production so that ecosystems and the communities that depend on them can thrive.”
Additional quotes in support of the report:
Marcos Orellana, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Toxics and Human Rights
“As if the well-documented toxic impacts of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers on human health were not enough, their widespread use pushes us past multiple planetary boundaries for climate, nitrogen, pollution, and biodiversity loss.”
David Boyd, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Environment and Human Rights
“Industrial agriculture is a dominant contributor to breaches of planetary boundaries and the triple environmental crisis. Fulfilling the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment and preventing the creation of sacrifice zones in the global South requires the complete transformation of industrial food systems.”
Tzeporah Berman, Chair Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative
“Oil and gas companies’ push to make our food systems more dependent on fossil fuels threatens the very air we breathe and the water we drink. This report is a wake-up call to policymakers to act quickly to phase out fossil fuels not only in our energy systems but also in our food systems.”
Lim Li Ching, Third World Network and IPES-Food
“This timely report shows that the food, climate and biodiversity crises are, in fact, interlinked and underpinned by systemic flaws in the industrial food system. Synthetic fertilizers derived from fossil fuels – fossil fertilizers – are a major source of emissions and the bedrock of industrial agriculture. The report unmasks the unholy alliance between the agrochemical and fossil fuel industries and the false solutions they peddle. Food system transformation, away from fossil- and agrochemical-dependent industrial agriculture towards climate-resilient agriculture systems such as agroecology, has never been more necessary.”
Henk Hobbelink, Coordination, Global Programme at GRAIN
“CIEL’s report shows how the fossil fuel and fertilizer industries collaborate to bring us yet another set of false solutions to the climate crisis. They try to convince us that their joint initiatives will bring us cleaner products, but nothing can hide the massive climate impacts of nitrogen fertilizer and fossil fuels they continue to produce.”
Marcia Ishii, Senior Scientist and Director of the Grassroots Science Program at Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA)
“Petroleum-based agrochemicals — pesticides and fertilizers — are truly the toxic twins of industrial agriculture, as this important report makes blazingly clear. Agrochemicals are unquestionably key drivers of today’s climate crisis — their contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions continues throughout their life cycles, from production through distribution, transport, application, and dispersal in the environment, while their disruption of the soil microbiome further weakens farming systems’ resilience to climate stressors. At the same time, these agrochemicals are responsible for unrelenting and devastating harm to human health, the world’s biodiversity, the integrity of the planet’s ecosystems, and the life support systems on which we all rely.
“Where the agrochemical industries seek to obscure the impacts of their false solutions, aiming to keep us on a fossil-based treadmill to maintain their profits, CIEL’s report shines a much-needed bright light on the problem: providing scientific data and evidence, along with an astute political analysis that connects the dots between corporate greed, failed policy responses, the demands of social and environmental justice, and the urgent need for a complete transition towards a fossil-free food and farming system.”
Teresa Anderson, Global lead on climate justice, ActionAid International
“Given that agriculture is the planet’s second biggest cause of climate change after fossil fuels, it’s long past time to put industrial agriculture in the climate spotlight. We can’t address the climate crisis unless we talk about the role of fossil-fuelled fertilizer in heating up our planet and driving food systems into the ground.
“This timely report shows that the global climate impact of nitrogen fertilizer is greater than that of commercial aviation. It exposes the deep ties between the fertilizer and fossil fuel industries and their common playbook to protect business-as-usual in the face of climate science.
“It’s clearly time to transform farming systems to work with nature instead of against it. If we are to prevent runaway climate breakdown, the writing is on the wall for the big agribusiness corporations.”
Sophia Murphy, Executive Director, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
“At a time when food systems’ dependence on chemical fertilizers has come into sharp relief, this report highlights how that dependence entangles the interests of fossil fuel companies with agribusiness. CIEL’s insightful analysis highlights that entanglement and offers decision-makers the possibility of transformational change: tighten the regulation of chemical fertilizers sharply and thereby reduce both agricultural emissions and dependence on fossil fuels.”
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Media contact:
Cate Bonacini: press@ciel.org, +1-202-742-5847