‘Fossil fuels incompatible with human survival’

BERLIN (AP):

The head of the United Nations (UN) launched a tirade against fossil fuel companies Thursday, accusing them of betraying future generations and undermining efforts to phase out a product he called “incompatible with human survival”.

Secretary General António Guterres also dismissed suggestions by some oil executives – including the man tapped to chair this year’s international climate talks in Dubai – that fossil fuel firms can keep up production if they find a way to capture planet-warming carbon emissions. He warned that this would just make them “more efficient planet-wreckers”.

It’s not the first time the UN chief has called out Big Oil over its role in causing global warming, but the blunt attack reflects growing frustration at the industry’s recent profit bonanza despite warnings from scientists that burning fossil fuels will push the world far beyond any safe climate threshold.

“Last year, the oil and gas industry reaped a record US$4 trillion windfall in net income,” Guterres said after a meeting with civil society groups. “Yet for every dollar it spends on oil and gas drilling and exploration, only four cents went to clean energy and carbon capture – combined.”

“Trading the future for 30 pieces of silver is immoral,” he said.

Guterres called on the industry to put forward a credible plan for shifting to clean energy “and away from a product incompatible with human survival”.

Investing their massive profits instead in renewable energy would allow the industry “to survive the transition and remain very important and relevant actors in the world economy”, he said.

Fossil fuel companies have lately pushed the idea that they should be allowed to keep pumping oil and gas out of the ground as long as they remove greenhouse gas emissions in the process, a suggestion experts reject as too complicated and costly to deliver the urgent cuts of greenhouse gas needed.

“The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions,” Guterres said, a nod to recent comments made by Sultan al-Jaber, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) official who will lead the next UN climate summit. “It’s fossil fuels – period.”

Al-Jaber, who is also the UAE’s minister of industry and chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, has come under fire from environmentalists and Western lawmakers for his close ties to the fossil fuel industry. He was chosen by the UAE to lead the COP28 talks and any criticism by the UN chief – albeit veiled – is highly unusual.

Asked whether there needs to be a firewall between fossil fuel interests and the UN climate talks, Guterres tried to strike a positive note, however.

“What I learned in politics was that sometimes some of the most daring progressive reforms were done by conservatives or so-called conservatives,” the socialist former prime minister of Portugal said. “And some of the most daring conservative changes were done by so-called progressives.”