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| Sir David Attenborough speaking at the conference. Listen to video. See link below. pn198 |
Guterres, who spoke at the opening of the UN climate conference in Poland, called climate change "the most important issue we face."
"Even as we witness devastating climate impacts causing havoc across the world, we are still not doing enough, nor moving fast enough, to prevent irreversible and catastrophic climate disruption," Guterres told delegates from almost 200 countries who gathered in the city of Katowice.
Famed British naturalist Sir David Attenborough echoed his warnings, telling the gathering that the "collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizons" if no urgent action is taking against global warming. Listen to the video.
The 92-year-old TV presenter blamed humans for the "disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years."
The UN chief chided countries, particularly those most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, for failing to do enough to back the 2015 Paris climate accord, which set a goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius — ideally 1.5 degrees C — by the end of the century.
Citing a recent scientific report on the dire consequences of letting average global temperatures rise beyond 1.5 degrees, Guterres urged countries to cut their emissions 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030 and aim for net zero emissions by 2050.
Net zero emissions mean that any greenhouse gases emitted need to be soaked up by forest or new technologies that can remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Such cuts, which experts say are the only way to achieve the 1.5-degree goal, would require a radical overhaul of the global economy and a move away from using fossil fuels.
"In short, we need a complete transformation of our global energy economy, as well as how we manage land and forest resources," Guterres said.
The Great Climate Change Swindle
By: David Cormack
Co-founder of communications and PR firm, Draper Cormack Group. He has worked for the Labour Party, the Green Party and has interned for Bill English.
COMMENT:
Your planet needs you.
We must do better. Recycle more. Take public transport. Use hemp bags when we go shopping. Drive less. Have fewer children. Buy electric cars. Haven't you heard? Climate change is our nuclear-free moment!
All of these platitudes are lovely but until we understand that an economic model of capitalism actually provides incentives to pollute, not much is going to change. Over 70 per cent of all harmful emissions worldwide come from just 100 fossil fuel companies
A report released two months ago by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that as a planet we have just 12 years to keep climate change to only a fairly terrible level instead of a calamitous one.
Just a few weeks later and the IPCC report was backed up by a study put together by several US federal agencies. That report was biblical in its forecasts, with literal famine and pestilence a by-product of climate change.
The 2016 Paris Agreement committed most of the world's countries to enacting policies that would reduce emissions and keep the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees - 2oc above the pre-industrial revolution temperature. Two years later and C02 emissions are increasing for the first time since 2014. Nailed it guys.
So with this in mind we should be super grateful to the good folks managing Countdown. It became the first supermarket chain in New Zealand to stop using single-use plastic carrier bags. Thanks Countdown! And in August this year the Government announced that New Zealand as a whole would be phasing out this scourge of the environment throughout the nation. It was the single most common thing that children wrote to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern about she said. Let's do this!
Except, what are we actually doing? We're shovelling the burden of responsibility onto the individual consumer for something that is not their responsibility. Sure, it's definitely better to phase out something like single-use plastic carrier bags, but let's not pretend it's some environmental panacea.
And for people who are struggling financially, those single-use bags are actually multi-use bags. They're rubbish bin liners, lunch boxes and school bags. So now with those bags being phased out we're placing a burden of cost onto poorer people to help clean up the environment.
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Great idea, Dave! Let's do that! Except can we maybe reprioritise it a bit? How about, instead of the people who contribute next to nothing to climate change - the family of four who shop at Countdown and now have to spend money on shopping bags - we get to the heart of the problem.
Those 100 fossil fuel companies that are responsible for nearly three quarters of all harmful emissions became aware of the risks of human induced climate change all the way back in the 1950s. They chose to do nothing.
Actually that's not true, they did do something. They organised strategic disinformation campaigns that delayed any effective policy response or decarbonisation for at least three decades. They set out to actively mislead so they could continue to pollute knowing they were inflicting massive harm onto the planet. Nice work big corporate. You guys are tops!
And not only that, but fossil fuels enjoy some serious subsidies. An IMF paper in 2015 estimated that these subsidies amounted to US$4.9 trillion - just a casual 6.5 per cent of global GDP.
On the flipside, 3.5 billion people worldwide have contributed just 10% of the emissions due to individual consumption. That's nearly half the world's population responsible for a tenth of the problem.
When your primary driver is money - which for these huge multinational fossil fuel companies it is - there is a stronger incentive to pollute and get bigger profits than not pollute and have reduced profits. We've chosen money over existence.
The immediate solution is to make it incredibly expensive for these polluters to pollute - there's a growing world-wide movement in support of a carbon tax, which was actually proposed by Helen Clark's Labour Government in 2005, however its coalition partners, New Zealand First and United Future, nixed it. Cool.
But of course a Carbon Tax would just get passed onto the consumer via higher costs they say, making it a regressive tax disproportionately hurting lower-income families. You know, like making them spend money on shopping bags, or putting up the tax on petrol. So instead we'll make the people think it's their fault, all the while big business gets away with it. We are Nero. We fiddle as the world literally burns.
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Climate change: Revealing its hand in today's extreme weather
A 15-year-old Swedish activist who takes time out of school to highlight the danger of global warming echoed his appeal. sentiment. old Greta Thunberg said world leaders who skip the climate summit are "very irresponsible."
Thunberg, who protests outside Sweden's parliament each week and has inspired students in other countries, said absent leaders such as US President Donald Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel "don't realize how much power they have."
"I think that in the future we will look back and we will either laugh at them or we will hate them," she told The Associated Press. "It's very sad, but if they don't do anything right now that is the truth."
Trump is only G20 world leader to not sign climate change statement
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the action film star and former governor of California, insisted the United States is "still in" the Paris accord to curb global warming despite Trump's decision to walk away from it.
"America is more than just Washington or one leader," he said, adding that he wished he could travel back in time — like the cyborg he portrayed in "The Terminator" — to stop fossil fuels from being used.
Calling Trump "meshugge"— Yiddish for "crazy" — for deciding to withdraw from the Paris accord, Schwarzenegger insisted that the climate deal has widespread support at local and state levels in the US.
A just transition
Duda, the Polish leader, said participants at the conference have backed his country's proposal that governments should ensure a "just transition" for workers in fossil fuel industries who stand to their jobs as the world shifts to renewable energy.
Last word to Fiji
Fiji's prime minister, Frank Bainimarama said any "just transition" should consider the fate of all the people around the world whose lives are affected by climate change.
Residents of the world's smaller islands, many of whom face catastrophic flooding from higher sea levels in a warming world, have been among the world's most vocal backers of measures to combat climate change.
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