I would like to thank Ine Van Robays, Fabio Tamburrini and Jean-Francois Jamet for their help in preparing this speech and Jakob Adolfsen, Juliette Desloires, Donata Faccia, Francesco Drudi, Alessandro Giovannini, Miles Parker, Laura Parisi and Lucas ter Braak for their input and comments. 2. Fossil fuels are coal, oil and natural gas.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) defines them as “buried combustible geologic deposits of organic materials, formed from decayed plants and animals that have been converted to crude oil, coal, natural gas, or heavy oils by exposure to heat and pressure in the earth's crust over hundreds of millions of years”. 3.