The UN Secretary General is once again banging his fist on the table to try to create an electric shock in the face of climate change. Humans represent the same “danger” for the planet as “the meteorite that exterminated the dinosaurs,” Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday as the Earth has just experienced the hottest twelve months ever measured.
“In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteorite. We are not only in danger, we are the danger,” he lambasted during a long speech in New York for World Environment Day.
Alarming figures
His remarks accompany the coordinated publication of the latest scientific alerts: May 2024 was the hottest month ever recorded in the world (on land and sea), the 12th month in a row to beat its own record, according to the European observatory Copernicus. And it is 80% likely that the global average temperature over a calendar year will “temporarily” exceed pre-industrial levels by more than 1.5°C by 2028, the World Meteorological Organization added, as we are at around 1.2°C over the last decade, according to a study also published Wednesday by dozens of renowned climatologists.
Humanity is therefore flirting with the limit of 1.5°C adopted by almost the entire planet in the 2015 Paris agreement, with one difference: this +1.5°C must be reached on average over decades to be considered our new stabilized climate.
“Global emissions must decrease by 9% per year until 2030 so that the limit of 1.5°C is not exceeded,” recalled Antonio Guterres. But the peak has not yet been officially reached.
“Solidarity taxes” on aviation and maritime transport
If humanity agreed at COP28 in Dubai in December to gradually abandon fossil fuels, their decline is still far from imminent. Antonio Guterres has therefore once again reserved his criticisms against this sector as a priority. For him, the players in fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) are nothing more and nothing less than “the godfathers of climate chaos” who “amass record profits and gorge themselves on billions of billions in subsidies”.
“I call on each country to ban advertising for fossil fuel companies”, like the bans for other “products harmful to human health, such as tobacco”, proposed the Secretary General. Antonio Guterres also repeated his call to tax the profits of the fossil fuel industry to finance the fight against global warming, also mentioning, without specifying his idea, “solidarity taxes” on aviation and maritime transport.