The speech struck an urgent tone as governments sit down for two weeks of talks on how to avert the worst of climate change, even as they are distracted by Russia’s war in Ukraine, rampant consumer inflation and energy shortages.
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“Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish,” Guterres told delegates gathered in the seaside resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. He called for an agreement between the world’s richest and poorest countries to speed up the transition from fossil fuels and provide funding to ensure that poorer countries can reduce emissions and deal with the effects of warming that have already occurred. “The two largest economies – the United States and China – have a special responsibility to join efforts to make this pact a reality,” he said. FOLLOW-UP l Compensation for developing countries is expected to be a tough sell:
Climate offset was added to the COP27 negotiations
Developing countries successfully added compensation for past climate damage to the COP27 negotiations, following news that keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees is now highly unlikely. Guterres called on countries to agree to phase out the use of coal, one of the most carbon-intensive fuels, by 2040 globally, with members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development reaching that limit by 2030. Despite decades of climate talks – Egypt’s COP is the 27th Conference of the Parties – progress has been insufficient to save the planet from excessive warming, as countries are too slow or unwilling to act, he noted. “Greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Global temperatures continue to rise. And our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible,” he said. “We’re on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the gas.” In its annual climate report, the UN Meteorological Service, the World Meteorological Organization, said that sea level rise in the past decade was twice as high as in the 1990s, and as of January 2020 it had increased by higher rate. Since the start of the decade, seas have been rising by five millimeters a year, compared with 2.1 millimeters in the 1990s. Front Burner26:06 As COP27 begins, a new picture of our climate future is emerging David Wallace-Wells, the acclaimed science journalist and author of The Uninhabitable Earth, says the past few years have given him reason to feel both “vibrant optimism” and “desperate despair” about the future of climate change. As the COP27 climate summit gets under way, we talk to Wallace-Wells about both — and we’ll start by talking about the good news. While we are not currently on track to keep global warming at the levels called for by the scientific community, the worst-case scenarios also seem much less likely than they did a few years ago. There is growing evidence that the actions the world has taken so far have really made a difference — and that we still have a significant ability to determine the kind of world that lies ahead. Former US Vice President Al Gore, meanwhile, had words for world leaders on Monday, criticizing developed countries’ pursuit of natural resources in Africa. “We have a credibility problem, all of us: we talk and we start to act, but we don’t do enough,” Gore said during a speech at the summit’s opening ceremony. “We need to see the so-called ‘gas dash’ for what it really is: a bridge to nowhere, leaving the world’s countries facing climate chaos and billions in stranded assets, especially here in Africa. “We must move beyond the era of fossil fuel colonialism.”
The UAE will continue to extract oil and natural gas
Immediately after Guterres’ speech, the president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, took the stage and said that his country, a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, would continue to produce fossil fuels as long as there was a need. “The UAE is seen as a responsible supplier of energy and will continue to play that role as long as the world needs oil and natural gas,” he said. The United Arab Emirates will host next year’s UN conference, which will attempt to finalize deals made last year in Britain and this year’s talks on Egypt. Signatories to the 2015 Paris climate agreement committed to a long-term goal of keeping global temperatures from rising more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Scientists have set this as the upper limit to avoid catastrophic climate change. Guterres said the goal would only remain alive if the world managed to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Read the World Meteorological Organization’s latest global climate report: The head of the International Monetary Fund told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference that climate targets depend on achieving a global carbon price of at least US$75 a tonne by the end of the decade and that the pace of change in the real economy is still “too slow”. . The World Trade Organization, meanwhile, said in a report published on Monday that it would need to address trade barriers for low-carbon industries to address the role of global trade in driving climate change.
