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AbstractAchieving the Paris Agreement's global temperature goal of keeping warming well below 2 °C and ideally 1.5 °C requires limiting fossil fuel production. In the United Nations climate change negotiations, this need is only beginning to be acknowledged. Nevertheless, as some countries have already adopted supply-side climate policies, initial cooperative activities have started, and calls grow for a fossil fuel treaty, questions arise about the prospects and possible effects of international cooperation on limiting fossil fuel supply. Combining qualitative insights on possible participants in a supply-side coalition with a quantitative analysis based on integrated assessment general equilibrium modelling, this article addresses these questions. Through k-means clustering based on fossil reserves per capita, fossil fuel rents and existing supply-side policies, we first identify which (groups of) countries are most likely to lead the formation of an international supply-side coalition, and which (groups of) countries are likely to follow. Drawing on these insights, we develop several scenarios for the evolution of international supply-side coalitions and compare these to a business-as-usual scenario. By doing so, we demonstrate the global and regional environmental, trade and macroeconomic effects of international cooperation on limiting fossil fuel supply and combining fossil supply restrictions with carbon pricing to meet the Paris goals. Our findings underscore the importance of pursuing supply-side and ambitious demand-side climate policies in parallel, and identify the scope and coverage, size of the coalition, and incentives for participation as key design elements for an international supply-side coalition.

Hopes are high that removing fossil fuel subsidies could help to mitigate climate change by discouraging inefficient energy consumption and levelling the playing field for renewable energy. In September 2016, the G20 countries re-affirmed their 2009 commitment (at the G20 Leaders' Summit) to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and many national governments are using today's low oil prices as an opportunity to do so. In practical terms, this means abandoning policies that decrease the price of fossil fuels and electricity generated from fossil fuels to below normal market prices. However, whether the removal of subsidies, even if implemented worldwide, would have a large impact on climate change mitigation has not been systematically explored. Here we show that removing fossil fuel subsidies would have an unexpectedly small impact on global energy demand and carbon dioxide emissions and would not increase renewable energy use by 2030. Subsidy removal would reduce the carbon price necessary to stabilize greenhouse gas concentration at 550 parts per million by only 2-12 per cent under low oil prices. Removing subsidies in most regions would deliver smaller emission reductions than the Paris Agreement (2015) climate pledges and in some regions global subsidy removal may actually lead to an increase in emissions, owing to either coal replacing subsidized oil and natural gas or natural-gas use shifting from subsidizing, energy-exporting regions to non-subsidizing, importing regions. Our results show that subsidy removal would result in the largest CO 2 emission reductions in high-income oil- and gas-exporting regions, where the reductions would exceed the climate pledges of these regions and where subsidy removal would affect fewer people living below the poverty line than in lower-income regions.