A host of leading figures have admitted during a gloomy start to a major climate summit in New York that Countries are ignoring commitments they made less than a year ago to shift away from fossil fuels and to provide aid to those most vulnerable to the climate crisis.
Al Gore, who is the former US vice-president, and John Kerry, the former US secretary of state and climate envoy, have led the condemnation of the largest greenhouse gas emitters, led by China and the US, for failing to follow a UN pact signed in Dubai by nearly 200 countries in December to “transition away” from oil, coal and gas.
“We made an agreement in Dubai to transition away from fossil fuels,” said Kerry, who was the US lead climate negotiator at the time. “The problem? We aren’t doing that. We’re not implementing. The implications for everybody, and life on this planet, is gigantic.”
Kerry, who in his previous position, was said to have defended the US’s role as it became the world’s leading oil and gas producer under Joe Biden, admitted that the US needed to do more and said a pause placed on booming liquified natural gas export permits by the US president should remain.
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“The demand is what is crushing us right now,” Kerry said of the surge in gas exports. “I have to tell you all around the world people are falling short or not even trying. In Dubai almost 200 countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in a way that’s fair, equitable and orderly … and they [fossil fuel companies] are just plowing ahead, like it’s business as usual.”
Asked to give oil and gas companies a grade in their efforts to transition to cleaner energy, Kerry said: “Is there a letter underneath Z?”
Kerry was speaking at an Axios event held as part of Climate Week NYC, a summit that has drawn about 100,000 government leaders, businesspeople, scientists and activists to New York alongside the UN general assembly.
The week is taking place amid a daunting backdrop of stubbornly high global emissions, record-breaking temperatures and the real possibility of Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and has called for the demolition of Biden’s climate policies, again becoming US president in November’s election.
Wealthy countries have been handing out new oil and gas exploration leases at record levels despite the agreement at the Cop28 talks in Dubai, with decades of further planet-heating emissions set to be locked in during 2024, itself almost certain to be the hottest ever recorded. “In signing such a surge of new oil and gas licenses, they are signing away our future,” António Guterres, secretary general of the UN, said of the highest emitters in July.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
