Guterres: “Humanity has opened the gates to hell”

UN Secretary General Guterres said that humanity has “opened the gates to hell”

Humanity has “opened the gates to hell” by allowing the climate crisis to worsen, the UN secretary-general has warned at the UN climate summit.

He denounced the fossil fuel industry and how nations continue to be the largest emitters of carbon dioxide. Writes about this The Guardian.

Antonio Guterres opened the UN climate summit on Wednesday in New York. He began by sharply criticizing rich countries and fossil fuel companies for their heavy-handed response to the climate crisis.

The UN secretary-general said the world is “decades behind” in the transition to clean energy. “We must make up for lost time due to the foot-dragging, arm-twisting and naked greed of the entrenched interests that make billions from fossil fuels,” Guterres said, adding that some fossil fuel companies have made a “shameful” attempt to corner this transition.

Guterres said rich countries need to get planet-warming emissions to net zero as close to 2040 as possible, a target a recent UN analysis found is far from being achieved, and provide promised climate finance to poorer and more vulnerable countries. which were still missing.

“Many of the poorest countries have every right to be angry, angry that they are suffering the most from a climate crisis they did not create, angry that promised funding has not materialized, and angry that their borrowing costs are sky-high,” he said. .

Guterres said that “humanity has opened the gates of hell”, causing increasing heatwaves, floods and wildfires seen around the world, and that a “dangerous and unstable” future of global warming of 2.8C above pre-industrial times awaits without radical action. “The future of humanity is in our hands,” he said. “We must accelerate the pace, turn plans into action and turn the tide.”

Leaders from more than 100 countries have been invited to attend the Climate Ambition Summit, with invitations extended to those deemed by the UN to “have new and improved climate ambitions”. In a sobering indication of the insufficient efforts needed to prevent catastrophic climate change, the leaders of two major polluters, Joe Biden, the US president, and Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, were absent from the summit.

Also absent were France’s Emmanuel Macron, India’s Narendra Modi and Britain’s Rishi Sunak, who has come under fire after announcing a relaxation of Britain’s net-zero emissions policy. “Their absence is an illustration of the fact that we are not taking seriously the magnitude of the challenge right now,” said Kelly Sims Gallagher, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University and a former White House adviser. “If we were serious, they would all be at the table today. It’s worrying.”

The summit contained a series of blistering accusations against the fossil fuel industry, in stark contrast to the previous “diplomatic” approach.