World governments have been breaking promises to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels, a report says.

The Overseas Development Institute says G20 nations spent almost £56bn ($90bn) a year finding oil, gas and coal.

It comes despite evidence that two thirds of existing reserves must be left in the ground if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change.

A government spokesman said the North Sea oil and gas industry “creates jobs and generates investment” in the UK.

The spokesman said the tax regime for oil and gas includes a number of allowances which reduce the tax burden on specific, challenging gas or oil fields.

Allowances did not constitute a subsidy, he added.

The UK government has previously said it was helping firms find fossil fuels within the UK to increase energy security, attract royalties and help with the balance of payments.

Fuel exploration

However, the report said subsidies were irrational, a waste of public money and harmful to the environment.

With rising costs for hard-to-reach fossil fuel reserves – together with falling coal and oil prices – renewable energy was a better way to invest taxpayers’ funds, it added.

The report’s authors said the UK had introduced national subsidies for exploration valued at up to £757 million a year.

Those included tax breaks for North Sea exploration worth £528 million to Total (HQ France), £256 million to Statoil (Norway), £144 million to Centrica (UK) and £45 million to Chevron (USA) between 2009 and 2014.

The report also traced G20 governments’ funding of fossil fuel exploration overseas.

The UK has been spending £418 million annually in public finance for exploration in Siberia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Guinea and Ghana, it said. The funding was through export finance guarantees.

The USA has been spending £883 million annually in public finance for overseas exploration in Colombia, Mexico, Nigeria and Russia, the report added.

Read more: BBC

See also: Clean Technica: G20 Supporting Fossil Fuels To The Tune Of $88 Billion

If Great Britain wants to keep its carbon emission reductions on course, it’s going to need to make some significant policy changes.

That’s the word from a new report just released by London’s Imperial College. The researchers ran models of six likely scenarios for how Britain’s economy and carbon emissions could behave under current policy. The country’s Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has recommended that Britain get its emission rate — the amount of carbon dioxide released for every unit of energy produced — down to 50 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour (gCO2/kWh) by 2030. But in all six scenarios, the rate remained at or above 100 gCO2/kWh in that year.

The problem is the country’s coal generation. Great Britain has already closed 8 gigawatts (GW) of coal power, leaving 19 GW spread between nine plants. And in every scenario, at least 5 GW of coal-fired power remained in operation in 2030. These coal plants were mostly built back in 1960s and 1970s. They tend to be extremely dirty and inefficient, and rank among some of the biggest carbon emitters in all of Europe. The power sector also accounts for about half of the country’s total emissions.

In 2008, Great Britain passed the Climate Change Act, which established the CCC and legally committed the country to getting its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions down to 80 percent below their 1990 levels by 2050. Subsequent legislation has created various tools for getting there, and empowered the Secretary of State to lay down an official target for the country’s power sector in 2016. For the moment, however, the CCC’s recommendation is the best goal post available.

The primary policy for hitting it is the European Union’s (EU) Emissions Trading System (ETS), a cap-and-trade program that includes Great Britain. But the country also has a Carbon Price Support (CPS) law, which sets a floor for how low the price of emissions on the ETS can drop within Britain’s market, and which rises over time. There are also regulations on emissions set by the EU as a whole, along with Britain’s own emissions performance standard (EPS) — which sets a rate limit for carbon emissions, but only for newly built power plants.

Read more: Climage Progress