UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres

Humanity at the climate crossroads: highway to hell or a livable future?

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Humanity at the climate crossroads: highway to hell or a livable future?

Damian Carrington

The choice in the new IPCC report is stark: what we do in the next few years will determine our fate for millennia

After a 10,000-year journey, human civilisation has reached a climate crossroads: what we do in the next few years will determine our fate for millennia.

That choice is laid bare in the landmark report published on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), assembled by the world’s foremost climate experts and approved by all the world’s governments. The next update will be around 2030 – by that time the most critical choices will have been made.

The report is clear what is at stake – everything: “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all.”

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“Continued emissions will further affect all major climate system components, and many changes will be irreversible on centennial to millennial time scales,” it says. To follow the path of least suffering – limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C – greenhouse gas emissions must peak “at the latest before 2025”, the report says, followed by “deep global reductions”. Yet in 2022, global emissions rose again to set a new record.

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Humanity at the climate crossroads: highway to hell or a livable future?

Continue ReadingHumanity at the climate crossroads: highway to hell or a livable future?

UN head accuses fossil fuel firms of business models ‘inconsistent with human survival’

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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/18/un-head-accuses-fossil-fuel-firms-of-business-models-inconsistent-with-human-survival

The head of the United Nations has accused the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies of refusing to abandon a business model at odds with human survival despite knowingly putting the world on course for a climate meltdown decades ago.

Speaking at the Davos summit of business and political leaders, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, launched a strong attack on the world’s leading oil companies, many of which are represented at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at the Swiss resort.

Guterres said recent revelations that ExxonMobil knew back in the 1970s that its core product was “baking our planet”, made “big oil” similar to the tobacco companies that knew smoking led to cancer.

“Just like the tobacco industry, they rode roughshod over their own science. Big Oil peddled the big lie … And like the tobacco industry, those responsible must be held to account,” he said.

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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/18/un-head-accuses-fossil-fuel-firms-of-business-models-inconsistent-with-human-survival

Continue ReadingUN head accuses fossil fuel firms of business models ‘inconsistent with human survival’

World treating nature like a ‘toilet’, says UN chief

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https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/us-news/2022/12/06/world-treating-nature-like-a-toilet-says-un-chief/

The world’s fossil fuel addiction has thrown the environment into chaos, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday at the opening of Cop15, the UN biodiversity summit.

“We are treating nature like a toilet,” Mr Guterres said at the conference in Canada.

“Unsustainable production and consumption are sending emissions skyrocketing and degrading our land, sea and air.”

As talks begin this week on a new set of global goals to protect nature over the next decade, Mr Guterres stressed that Cop15 is an opportunity to halt “this orgy of destruction”.

He called on the private sector to recognise that profit and protection “must go hand in hand” and asked developed countries to provide bold financial support for the Global South, which should not be expected to shoulder the burden alone.

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Continue ReadingWorld treating nature like a ‘toilet’, says UN chief