Tzeporah Berman, the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/02/05

Tzeporah Berman, BA, MES, LLD (honoris causa), is the International Program Director at Stand.earth and Chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. With over thirty years of experience in environmental campaigning and policy, she co-founded ForestEthics and served as Greenpeace International’s Global Climate and Energy Program co-director. Tzeporah has received numerous accolades, including the 2019 Climate Breakthrough Project Award and the 2015 YWCA Women of Distinction Award. Her work has protected over 40 million hectares of old-growth forests and influenced global climate policies. An influential speaker and author, she advocates for a global treaty to phase out fossil fuels and promote equity, justice, and sustainability. Berman outlines the treaty’s goal to globally phase out fossil fuel production by enforcing regulations aligned with Paris Agreement targets. This initiative aims to stabilize energy markets, shift global power dynamics, and achieve sustainable development by reducing emissions and fostering renewable energy investments. Key challenges include resistance from countries profiting from fossil fuels and the necessity for international cooperation. Effective communication strategies have secured broad support, emphasizing equity, justice, and fairness. Additionally, the treaty seeks to transform corporate social responsibility by prioritizing genuine emissions reductions over ineffective offsets, ultimately aiming to change societal norms regarding fossil fuel use.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So today, we’re here with Tzeporah Berman. She’s the founder and chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-proliferation Treaty Initiative. She’s based out of Vancouver, British Columbia. First, what are the probable outcomes of the Fossil Fuel Non-proliferation Treaty Initiative on global markets and international relations?

Tzeporah Berman: It’s a very big question. If we are successful, the Fossil Fuel Treaty will help design and manage a phase-out of fossil fuel production globally. Right now, it is left up to the marketplace. How much gets produced, when, and by whom?

If the Fossil Fuel Treaty is successful, it will create greater regulations and constraints on production that align with Paris goals, which will affect global energy markets.

Our theory is that we shouldn’t leave the fate of the future to the so-called free market. Climate change is one of the free market’s single greatest failures. We need to regulate production.

If countries agree to do that and cooperate under the treaty, then that will limit supply and impact who’s producing and how much. So, it will have a significant impact on global energy markets. I think it will also change the dynamics in international relations.

Right now, a lot of profits are made through fossil fuel production, and the structure of power dynamics globally is based in large part on colonial systems and who has the money. If we constrain the production of fossil fuels and, therefore, constrain the profits made by the incumbents, then that starts to shift what we value.

It also starts shifting international relations and who’s powerful in significant ways.

Because the production and distribution of fossil fuels underlies our economic and political systems, these aren’t tinkering on the edges about replacing this megawatt with that megawatt. This is about a redistribution of power in every sense of the word.

Jacobsen: What is a managed or responsible decline of fossil fuel production within sustainable development models?

Berman: For 30 years, we have been trying to address climate change by managing demand and managing emissions. That’s what the majority of our climate policy globally at every level of government is about. It’s about how much people get to pollute and how we reduce the demand for fossil fuels.

The result is that while we’ve had some great success implementing demand-side measures in many jurisdictions that are successfully reducing emissions, emissions continue to rise globally.

Right now, the UNEP and Stockholm Environment Institute, in the production gap report, note that we’re on track to produce 110% more fossil fuels than can ever be burned and maintain a stable 1.5 degrees Celsius. That production would be by 2030.

We need to align production with demand destruction and our climate goals because what we build today will be what we use tomorrow. The theory that we could reduce the demand, reduce the cost and price of renewables, and increase the price of carbon to constrain fossil fuel production to manage the decline isn’t working.

It’s not working largely because the markets are distorted by trillions of dollars in fossil fuel subsidies each year and because of various decisions made by a very small group of countries, most notably under OPEC.

So, a well planned phase out of fossil fuel production is essential to sustainable development goals because fossil fuel expansion is the greatest threat to meeting all 17 of our sustainable development goals.

So we produced a report on that for Stockholm plus 50 and looked at the research worldwide on every major sustainable development goal, whether you’re looking at gender, poverty, water, health, or many other issues.

Fossil fuel expansion is at the root of the impacts and the threats to meeting those sustainable development goals, leaving climate aside entirely just fossil fuel air pollution alone is the leading cause of premature death worldwide, with over 8 million people dying last year just from air pollution alone the majority of which came from fossil fuels.

If we regulate and start to manage a decline in fossil fuel production, then that will help us meet every other one of our sustainable development goals. And let’s not forget that fossil fuels are also responsible for 86 percent of the carbon trapped in our atmosphere, causing the fires, floods, and extreme weather that result from climate change.

Jacobsen: What are the challenges in the implementation of the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty?

Berman: The primary challenge to implementing a fossil fuel treaty at this point is that a small group of countries stand to benefit significantly from the continued expansion of fossil fuel production, and they don’t want to let that go. Of course, not a single country in the world doesn’t recognize that climate change is one of the greatest threats to global and national security and stability. However, every country likes to believe they can be the last barrel sold, and we can still align production with Paris’s goals and ensure a phase-out. The problem is, of course, it’s not at all true when you add that up.

It’s a typical tragedy of the commons problem, and that’s why we need international cooperation and countries to collaborate. We do not expect at this point in the fossil fuel treaty that major producing nations, especially the ones that are planning the greatest expansion such as Canada, the United States, and Australia, these wealthy northern countries are responsible for the majority of fossil fuel expansion that is planned on the planet in the next five years. We do not expect that they or other incumbents such as Saudi Arabia or Russia will join a fossil fuel treaty. That weakens the impact in the short term. However, when we studied six other international treaties, what we found is that many of the most difficult and intransigent issues and treaties were created by a small group of high-ambition countries that started to create rules that have consequences for countries not being in the group.

So, when we consider the fossil fuel treaty, we’re looking at mechanisms and agreements such as market access agreements, trade agreements, tax agreements, and debt relief agreements that would create benefits only for the club of countries negotiating and signing on to the treaty. The treaty has impact. One is that it will start to change the rules of the game of fossil fuel production and expansion.

One of the agreements under the treaty that we’re looking at, for example, is that all countries that have endorsed the treaty commit to purchasing only fossil fuels from other treaty countries in the transition period.

So what that would literally mean is that you’re saying to Colombia, for example, we’ll need to buy some of your oil and gas between now and 2050, but we’re only going to buy from you because you’ve committed to aligning production with Paris goals and helping design a treaty.

That provides more certainty of production and price for both the buyer and the seller. It creates a new OPEC. So, being in the club of countries designing the fossil fuel treaty would have benefits, and there would be negative consequences for countries that aren’t.

But the other big area besides the specific mechanisms is the question of how we shift the social norm about what is acceptable behaviour within foreign policy and what we’ve seen with other major treaties, whether it be the landmine treaty or chemical weapons ban for example or even nuclear non-proliferation with both nuclear treaties is that you had small groups of countries that started to form the rules and support from around the world through campaigns and communications for what they were doing.

The campaigns to end landmines and the nuclear-free cities campaigns in the 70s. This work started to shift what was acceptable, and those treaties created new social norms. So even though, for example, Russia or Saudi Arabia doesn’t join the treaty, they stop stockpiling the weapons because it has become unacceptable in other areas of bilateral or multilateral conversation and within foreign policy to stockpile those weapons.

Today, fossil fuels are our weapons of mass destruction. They are the greatest single cause of death and threat to global security and health. So, we need countries to understand that stockpiling and expanding the production of fossil fuels is simply unacceptable.

This is almost an entire flip in social norms that will have to happen because many of us grew up with a constant drumbeat from the fossil fuel industry and incumbents that expanding fossil fuels was essential to prosperity. We need to flip that social norm, and that’s part of what we’re trying to do with the diplomatic, campaigning, and communications efforts of the fossil fuel treaty.

Jacobsen: How does climate activism compare with historical environmentalism regarding types of strategies?

Berman: That’s an interesting question. The first couple of decades of climate activism didn’t learn from other environmental movements and environmental successes because climate activism was, in part, born out of science and policy logs. It was a movement based on targets, on numbers, on what was going to happen in the future, and the result was that the narrative and conversation were very inaccessible to the majority of people.

They couldn’t see carbon, climate impacts in their daily lives, or a relationship between their lives and these targets that groups were saying were essential for governments to set. So, it was very difficult to build a political movement around emissions targets and benchmarks, which were an invisible threat. When the pipeline and coal plant campaigns started emerging, the campaigns ‘ work became much more tangible and directly reflected the lessons learned from the forest movements in the ’70s through the ’90s.

Place-based organizing with impacted people has multiple sets of tools, including litigation, regulatory focus pro, tests and movement building and has significantly strengthened the climate movement around the world to make it more accessible. Today, the climate movement and certainly the movement for the fossil fuel treaty, which I know closest of all, is more diverse than any other environmental movement in history. We see doctors, faith leaders, scientists, Indigenous people, frontline community leaders, world-leading scientists, mayors, and presidents of nations standing together to call for something and working together to raise awareness because climate change affects every aspect of our lives.

There are many different entry points. Over the past 10 years, the issue has opened up, and people can see the real impacts in their daily lives. The movement has started to focus more on tangible projects and opposition to those projects rather than just emissions and policy targets. We’re starting to see a strong and more diversified movement.

Jacobsen: What are your near-term goals for shaping public discourse and policy?

Berman: The most important goal in shaping the discourse is to shift fossil fuels from being a siloed conversation within technical energy phase-out and maybe decarbonization conversations and elevating the need for a fossil fuel phase-out and the plans for a fossil fuel phase-out to be a part of every conversation that we have because the climate challenge is a direct result of our fossil fuel use and production. It will not be resolved without a fossil fuel phase-out that affects every aspect of our lives. 

Unfortunately, we have conversations politically and in popular communications about affordability, health, education, and economic stability. Then we have this smaller conversation about the decarbonization effort, fossil fuels and energy systems or climate change. Still, those issues are directly linked to the climate impacts we see today in the challenge of a fossil fuel phase-out. Yesterday, I went to buy a bottle of olive oil from my favourite Greek store here in Vancouver, and the tin that was $40 last year is $108 this year. The woman at the till said so many olive groves all across Greece and Italy either went up in flames or the trees fell over during the floods, so we don’t have olives. There’s a direct correlation between these different aspects of our daily lives. What’s happening in the climate? The answer comes down to the fossil fuel phase-out.

The most critical thing we can do is have our eyes wide open and have this conversation about managing the decline of our use and production of fossil fuels, which is at the core of all of the other policy and political conversations.

Jacobsen: How effective are the communication strategies employed and used in the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty initiative?

Berman: Our communication strategies have been quite effective. We’ve grown very quickly over the past four years. We started with almost no money and two full-time staff people proposing an entirely new global treaty and a conversation around the world during COVID.

Today, 16 nations are working on a fossil fuel treaty. We have a network of 3,800 organizations in every corner of the globe. The campaign is active in 40 to 50 countries at this point. Hundreds of cities have endorsed through motions.

Three thousand of the world’s leading scientists have now endorsed the concept of the fossil fuel treaty. This month, we passed the threshold of a million individuals who have signed on to the treaty. So, for that growth in the time that we’ve had with the resources that we’ve had, it has to be that our communications are effective.

From the polling, two things are in our favor. One is that although the actual treaty and the issues will be very complicated, we have been able to simplify the choice at hand. While climate change is complicated, it depends on how much we produce and use three products: coal, oil, and gas.

Ultimately, we need to work together to stop producing the bad stuff so we can focus our money and elected officials on fast-tracking the good stuff. It’s quite simple, and it speaks to people’s values. The fossil fuel treaty is about fairness.

It’s about justice and equity in the transition. Our communications also benefit people by being almost like a big reveal. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has made its products invisible in climate policy and negotiations, to the extent that the words “fossil fuels” don’t even exist in the Paris Agreement, nor do the words “oil,” “gas,” and “coal.”

That’s part of the reason we haven’t been able to reach our climate targets successfully. People really wanted an answer to why it’s not working. Well, it’s not working because we’re not even talking about, let alone focusing on, reducing the products that are harming us.

There’s an answer there: a motivation around fairness, a simple choice we’re asking, and a shared global demand. Whether you live in Mozambique, in the rainforest in Ecuador, in the tar sands in Canada or anywhere on the globe, you can ask your elected official to support a fossil fuel treaty. We haven’t had one big global demand that makes us feel greater than the sum of our parts, that makes us feel like we’re not alone at home campaigning or working on climate change, but in fact, we’re part of something much bigger.

We haven’t had that—maybe not since Paris 10 years ago. So, the momentum and the shared global demand—what we’ve seen in our polling and our focus groups—are that people are saying, finally, big, bold demand and ask and vision that is commensurate with the scale of the problem.

People are tired of you telling them that the planet is on fire and that they should wear a sweater or save to buy a Prius. It’s not enough.

Jacobsen: What is the foundational ethic in arguing for a transition from fossil fuels?

Berman: Equity, justice, and fairness. Those ethics are essential to arguing for a fossil fuel treaty. Renewables are now cheaper in every corner of the planet than fossil fuels.

Electrification is faster than the transition to fossil fuels. The pickup of electric cars has been off the charts. One in five cars sold on the planet this year will be electric. We will phase out fossil fuels because it makes sense. It’s cheaper, it’s safer, and it doesn’t kill people. A solar spill is just a sunny day, unlike an oil spill, many of which I’ve lived through.

The question is, how fast will it happen, and how many people will be left behind? How much damage will there be? Those are the core questions today. We are already experiencing the impacts of climate change. Every ton of carbon we save from entering the atmosphere, every LNG project or coal plant we save from being built, will save lives. Right now, the most vulnerable people are in countries that haven’t benefited from the fossil fuel era and haven’t created the problem.

If those countries struggling under crushing debt are going to move forward on a fossil fuel phase-out and not end up caught into the fossil fuel system now to feed their debt, which is what we’re seeing. Ecuador is drilling in the heart of the Amazon rainforest to feed its debt. If those countries will move forward and have strong economies that are safe in the future, a fossil fuel treaty or some of the mechanisms we’re discussing under a fossil fuel treaty is absolutely essential.

This question of who gets to produce fossil fuels right now, if it is the dangerous resource that we know that it is, and we can only use limited quantities of it on this planet, who should get to produce and use it is ultimately an equity issue and a fairness issue. Right now, the countries producing the most of it and planning to expand the most of it are the countries that created this problem and are the countries that have very rich economies as a result in part of the fossil fuel era. A fossil fuel treaty ensures equity, fairness, and justice.

Jacobsen: What needs to be done to promote more corporate social responsibility practices?

Berman: This is such a big question, too. I’m going to zero in on one issue. Right now, the majority of the world’s corporations and banks are claiming to have climate plans by buying their way out of the problem through offsets and carbon credits, even though in the last five years, the majority of offsets and carbon credits have been debunked as useless and certainly fraudulent.

The science is very clear. We need absolute emissions reductions and a decline in fossil fuel production, and we need to stop investing in fossil fuels.

Many banks and corporations find that difficult or don’t want to do it because they still stand to make enormous profits off their production or use of fossil fuels. They create corporate social responsibility plans on climate change and sustainability through the idea that they can buy forests and other credits and continue to pollute. Even if it were a system that was working, the time for that is long past.

With a planet on fire, we don’t need one tool in our tool belt now. We need everything we can get. That means we need companies to commit to no new fossil fuel investment and an absolute decline in emissions and production of fossil fuels, along with investing in local community initiatives to protect nature and ensure our greater standing.

They don’t get to choose, and they don’t get to buy one off against the other.

Jacobsen: What needs to be done to promote more corporate social responsibility practices?

Berman: Right now, the majority of the world’s corporations and banks are claiming to have climate plans by buying their way out of the problem through offsets and carbon credits, even though in the last five years, the majority of offsets and carbon credits have been debunked as useless and fraudulent.

The science is very clear: We need an absolute decline in emissions and production of fossil fuels and a stop to investing in them. 

Many banks and corporations find that difficult or don’t want to do it because they still stand to make enormous profits from their production, use, or investment in fossil fuels. They create corporate social responsibility plans on climate change and sustainability through the idea that they can buy forests and other credits and continue to pollute. Even if it were a system that was working, the time for that is long past.

We don’t just need one tool in our tool belt right now, with a planet on fire. We need everything we can get. That means we need companies to commit to no new fossil fuel investment and an absolute decline in emissions and production of fossil fuels, along with investing in local community initiatives to protect nature and ensure our greater standing.

They don’t get to choose, and they don’t get to buy one off against the other. I think this modeling system under net zero, which allows them to buy offsets and credits and claim to be sustainable companies or to have good climate change policies, will be seen as one of the greatest scandals and frauds of the 21st century. 

Jacobsen: Are there any final points?

Berman: Here are the things that we didn’t get to. One of the things that a fossil fuel treaty will do if we manage the phase out of  fossil fuel production is stimulate investments in renewable energy technologies and infrastructure and elevate and support the rising demand for clean energy, which will, in turn, lower costs through innovation and economies of scale. That’s a critical piece regarding global energy markets, which I didn’t get to. The fossil fuel industry, or the fossil fuel era, has been characterized by boom and bust moments.

It is very volatile, and these are volatile products. So, one of the impacts on global energy markets will be to ensure less vulnerability and more stability, which will have reverberations throughout the economy for planning, community stability, and economic stability. I think we have seen a direct correlation between many wars and power held in the hands of a very small number of people and, at times, very destructive and fascist governments. That power, that money, or that war is a direct result of fossil fuels. We will start to see that shift as our fossil fuel dependence decreases. We’ll see enhanced influence for countries that prioritize renewable energy development, which by its very nature has less potential for weaponization and more potential for stability and diversification of power within nation-states and between nation-states.

And then finally, one of the big barriers, because one of your questions was about barriers, and one of the big barriers or problems that we’re seeing arising, which has to be overcome, is the potential for legal disputes over devalued fossil fuel assets. So, the question of stranded assets is huge. And, of course, we’re already seeing governments facing liabilities under investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms. We will see a rise in that in the years to come. So, the connection between straight and ISDS agreements and how those issues will be resolved as fossil fuel assets are mothballed are huge questions.

There will be a period of increased market uncertainty, which could deter investments in industries relying on fossil fuels. Then, they may risk the knock-on effects of stranded assets and capital shifts. But in some ways, that’s why it’s so important to have a cooperative timeline agreed to for a managed decline of fossil fuel phase-out so you can plan for those shifts. There is no question that we’ll see greater instability in a fossil fuel phase-out if it isn’t planned and there isn’t as much cooperation between states. Yep. That’s all I had.

Jacobsen: Laura, thank you very much for your time today. I appreciate it.

Berman: You’re welcome.

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