UN Secretary-General (former Prez of Socialist International) warns expanding fossil fuels ‘are signing away our future’
UN Secretary-General Says the World Must Turbocharge the Fossil Fuel Phaseout
By Bob Berwyn
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to make an urgent call to “turbo charge” cuts to fossil fuels.
“All countries must deliver by next year nationally determined contributions, or national climate action plans, aligned to limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” Guterres said Thursday to the press in New York. Three days after the Earth recorded its hottest day ever on Monday, at a global average surface temperature of 17.15 degrees Celsius, he reminded 196 countries of their Paris climate agreement pledges.
The current plans add up to about 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming above the pre-industrial average by 2100. That’s well above the Paris Agreement’s goal of capping warming as close to 1.5 degrees as possible and into the realm of extremely dangerous heating, with nearly unsurvivable heatwaves, crop failures and more severe floods and droughts.
Those are the symptoms of the climate crisis, and “to tackle all these symptoms, we need to fight the disease,” he said. “The disease is the madness of incinerating our only home. The disease is the addiction to fossil fuels. The disease is climate inaction.”
“I must call out the flood of fossil fuel expansion we are seeing in some of the world’s wealthiest countries,” Guterres said. “In signing such a surge of new oil and gas licenses, they are signing away our future.”