{"id":2283,"date":"2019-01-27T15:54:45","date_gmt":"2019-01-27T15:54:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euromenaenergy.com\/?p=2283"},"modified":"2019-01-27T15:54:45","modified_gmt":"2019-01-27T15:54:45","slug":"un-chief-we-are-losing-race-on-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/?p=2283","title":{"rendered":"UN chief: We are losing race on climate change"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

AFP\/Davos<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The world is \u201closing the race\u201d against climate change, UN chief Antonio Guterres warned yesterday, demanding bolder action from governments to arrest runaway warming.
\nGuterres delivered a no-holds-barred appraisal to business and political leaders gathered at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, which has featured much hand-wringing on the planetary crisis this week.
\n\u201cIn my opinion it is the most important global systemic threat in relation to the global economy,\u201d the UN secretary-general told his high-calibre audience.
\n\u201cClimate change is running faster than what we are,\u201d he said. \u201cI believe we are losing the race.\u201d
\nThe business community and civil society are increasingly engaged, \u201cbut the political will is still very slow\u201d, he said, lamenting the position of climate doubters.
\n\u201cWe are moving dramatically into a runaway climate change if we are not able to stop it.\u201d
\nA UN summit last month in Poland, which was designed to advance the Paris climate accord, laid bare continuing fissures over the share of responsibility among countries to cap temperature rises.
\nThe Paris accord has been shaken by the withdrawal of the United States under President Donald Trump, and by threats to do the same by Brazil\u2019s new hard-right leader, Jair Bolsonaro.
\nGuterres, on an earlier Facebook Live broadcast, said that the commitments made in Paris were already \u201cnot enough\u201d but was \u201cnot hopeful\u201d that nations would find the necessary resolve.
\n\u201cIf what we agreed in Paris would be materialised, the temperature would rise more than 3.0\u00b0 (Celsius),\u201d he said.
\n\u201cWe need countries to make stronger commitments,\u201d Guterres said, calling for more measures to mitigate climate change and adapt to it, along with financial aid for poorer countries.
\nA WEF survey ahead of the Davos meeting found that climate change was the leading concern of forum participants around the world, noting in particular the growing frequency of extreme weather events.
\nCorporate executives in Davos such as Patrick Pouyanne, the chief executive of French energy giant Total, have been touting their own measures to transition to a greener economy.
\n\u201cWe don\u2019t look to renewables to be green,\u201d he told the CNBC channel in Davos yesterday, noting that electricity is the fastest-growing segment of the energy market.
\n\u201cWe look to renewables because it\u2019s the best way to go in to this electricity market, but the electricity market will require also natural gas, so natural gas and renewables.\u201d
\nHowever, activists say companies are not doing nearly enough.
\nOne vocal voice in Davos this week has been Swedish 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, who has inspired a wave of climate protests by schoolchildren around the world after delivering a fiery speech at the UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland last month.
\n\u201cThey (companies) have known exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money,\u201d she told AFP in an interview.
\nFormer US secretary of state John Kerry, who signed the Paris accord for the United States in 2016, said that 38 out of the 50 US states were implementing their own climate policies despite Trump\u2019s withdrawal and vocal scepticism on climate change.
\nThe Paris pact was based partly on the expectation that the private sector would step up with new investment in areas such as batteries and solar panels, he noted.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s not happening enough, and even in Katowice recently, you saw the fight that was taking place, just to be able to try to be reasonable here,\u201d Kerry said in Davos on Tuesday, also on CNBC.
\n\u201cWe\u2019re heading towards 4.0\u00b0 Centigrade increase in this century, and the passive indifference that most countries are accepting is basically a mutual suicide pact.\u201d
\nAnother idea long in the mix of the climate debate is a carbon tax, which would factor in the polluting price of fossil fuels so as to discourage their use over time.
\nThat has been anathema for many governments, including the United States well before Trump.
\nHowever, it is gaining ground anew under an initiative by the Climate Leadership Council that is backed by 27 Nobel economics laureates and four former chairs of the Federal Reserve.
\nTed Halstead, president of the US organisation, has been in Davos this week selling the idea of US households getting back the revenue raised, in the form of lump-sum rebates.
\nGreenpeace welcomed the intervention by Guterres.
\n\u201cThe UN secretary general\u2019s speech once again drives the urgency of the climate emergency home,\u201d said the environmental group\u2019s executive director Jennifer Morgan. \u201cGuterres\u2019s argument is compelling and has to be heard.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AFP\/Davos The world is \u201closing the race\u201d against climate change, UN chief Antonio Guterres warned yesterday, demanding bolder action from governments to arrest runaway warming. Guterres delivered a no-holds-barred appraisal to business…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2293,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[46,57,90,96,107,137,139,160,174,184,201,202,209,232,233,244,246,249,256,267,277,279,288],"class_list":["post-2283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aramco","tag-baroudi","tag-democracy","tag-doha","tag-embargo","tag-gas","tag-gazprom","tag-international-maritime-disputes","tag-lebanon","tag-maritime-disputes","tag-offshore","tag-oil","tag-opec","tag-putin","tag-qatar","tag-rosneft","tag-roudi","tag-russia","tag-saudi","tag-straddling-hydrocarbons-reserves","tag-total","tag-trump","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}