The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres has said that the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies are unwilling to abandon a business model that is at variance with human survival despite knowingly putting the world on course for a climate meltdown decades ago.
Guterres said this at the ongoing Davos summit of business and political leaders, where he launched a strong attack on the world’s leading oil companies, many of which are represented at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at the Swiss resort.
Guterres said that recent revelations that ExxonMobil knew back in the 1970s that its core product was “baking our planet”, made “big oil” similar to the tobacco companies that knew smoking led to cancer.
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“Just like the tobacco industry, they rode roughshod over their own science. Big Oil peddled the big lie … And like the tobacco industry, those responsible must be held to account,” he said. “Today, fossil fuel producers and their enablers are still racing to expand production, knowing full well that their business model is inconsistent with human survival. This insanity belongs in science fiction, yet we know the ecosystem meltdown is a cold, hard scientific fact,”.
Guterres said that many of the pledges made by companies to achieve net zero carbon amounted to greenwashing even though the need to step up progress in the global battle to prevent a rise in temperature of more than 1.5C has been one of the themes of the Davos meeting.
He further stated that achieving the climate goals agreed upon by the international community required the full engagement of the private sector and acknowledged that more and more businesses were making net zero commitments.
“The battle to keep the 1.5-degree limit alive will be won or lost in this decade. On our watch. My friends, right now it is being lost,” he said. “We must act together to close the emissions gap. To phase out coal and supercharge the renewable revolution. To end the addiction to fossil fuels. And to stop our self-defeating war on nature,”.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
