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GENEVA (AP) — The UN weather agency’s greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean temperature, sea-level rise and ocean acidification hit record levels last year, the United Nations chief said Wednesday.
“Before we burn our only home, we must end fossil fuel pollution and accelerate the renewable energy transition,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. “Time is running out.”
Its latest warning of possible environmental disaster comes after the World Meteorological Organization released its 2021 State of Climate Report, which said the past seven years were the seventh hottest on record. The effects of extreme weather have led to deaths and sickness, migration and hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses, and the fallout continues this year, the WMO said.
“Today’s State of Climate report is a depressing lithograph of humanity’s failure to tackle climate degradation,” Guterres said. “The global energy system is broken and it is bringing us closer to climate catastrophe.”
In his plan, based on the next UN climate conference in Egypt in November, Guterres has called for promoting technology transfer and removing intellectual property protections in renewable technologies such as battery storage.
Such ambitions – as in the call for the transfer of technologies aimed at fighting COVID-19 – can harden innovators and their financial backers: They want to reap the benefits of their knowledge, investments and discoveries – not just giving them away.
Second, Guterres wants to expand access to supply chains and raw materials entering renewable technologies, currently concentrated in a few powerful countries.
The UN chief also wants governments to reform in ways that can promote renewable energies, such as speeding up solar and wind projects.
Fourth, he called for a shift from government subsidies for fossil fuels, currently at half a trillion dollars a year. It’s not an easy task: Such subsidies can ease the pockets of many consumers – but ultimately they can also help inject cash into corporate vaults.
“While people are suffering from high prices at the pump, the oil and gas industry is making billions of dollars from a distorted market,” Guterres said. “This scandal must stop”
Finally, Guterres says private and public investment in renewable energy must triple to at least $4 trillion a year. He noted that government subsidies for fossil fuels are three times higher today than for renewables.
These UN initiatives are based on a central idea: that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions in the industrial age trap excess heat in the atmosphere, Earth’s surface, oceans and seas. The knockdown has contributed to more frequent and severe natural disasters such as droughts, hurricanes, floods and forest fires.
Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist at tech company Stripe and nonprofit Berkeley Earth, which focuses on environmental data science, says a good way to move towards net zero emissions is to “make clean energy cheap.”
“Rich countries may overspend on clean energy, while poor and middle-income countries may be less willing to accept trade-offs between reducing emissions and saving millions from misery,” he said. “If clean energy sources are cheaper than fossil fuels, they become a win-win and are adopted faster.”
The WMO report breaks little new ground in terms of data, but compiles previous work into a broader picture of global climate.
Its secretary-general, Petteri Taalas, pointed to a decline in emissions in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic curtailed human activities. But he said that doesn’t change the “big picture” because carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas, has a long life and persists, and emissions have already increased since then.
“We’ve seen this steady increase in carbon dioxide concentration, which is linked to the fact that we’re still using a lot of fossil fuels,” Taalas said in an interview. “Deforestation still occurs in regions like the Amazon, Africa, and South Asia.”
The UN climate conference, held in Glasgow, Scotland last year, failed to gather carbon-cutting commitments from “BRICS” countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which threatens a key goal of the 2015 Paris agreement to limit global warming. “1.5 degrees Celsius,” he said.
“We are heading towards a warming of 2.5 to 3 degrees Celsius instead of 1.5,” Taalas said.
Climate experts praised UN ambitions and WMO condemned the findings, saying some countries were heading in the wrong direction.
“If climate change is death by a thousand cuts, we got our thousandth in 2021,” said Rob Jackson, professor of Earth Systems Science at Stanford University and who also heads the Global Carbon Project, which monitors carbon emissions.
“Dirty coal use has returned through economic stimulus incentives for COVID in China and India. “We’ve built more new coal power plant capacity worldwide than we’ve disabled,” he said. “How is this possible in 2021?”
Jonathan Overpeck, a professor of environmental education at the University of Michigan, noted that fossil fuels played a role in the Russian government’s war in Ukraine. Russia is a major global producer of oil and gas, including a pipeline through Ukraine to supply homes and businesses in Europe.
“The secretary general is right to blame fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are creating a worsening climate crisis and everything that comes with it,” said Overpeck. “The solution to climate change, deadly air pollution, and true national security is to leave fossil fuels behind in favor of clean renewable energy.”
“It’s getting scary,” he added. “The climate crisis and the European war are a call to action and to rid the planet of fossil fuels as quickly as possible.”
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Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer in Washington, contributed to this report.
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