United Nations secretary general António Guterres employed some of his most apocalyptic climate rhetoric to date on Monday, warning participants in the COP27 climate summit of “climate chaos” due to humanity’s “fossil fuel addiction.”
“We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator,” the Portuguese diplomat insisted during his Cop27 opening speech in the resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.
“How will we answer when baby 8 billion is old enough to ask: What did you do for our world and for our planet when you had the chance?” he asked.
“This U.N. Climate Conference is a reminder that the answer is in our hands. And the clock is ticking. We are in the fight of our lives and we are losing,” he alleged.
“Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing. Global temperatures keep rising. And our planet is fast approaching tipping points that would make climate chaos irreversible,” he contended.
The U.N.’s alarmist-in-chief stressed no other issue, not even the war in Ukraine, should distract people from the overriding matter of climate change, which is the “defining issue of our age.”
“The war in Ukraine, other conflicts, have caused so much bloodshed and violence and have dramatic impacts all over the world, but we cannot, we cannot accept that our attention is not focused on climate change,” he reiterated.
“We must of course work together to support peace efforts and end the tremendous suffering, but climate change is on a different timeline and a different scale. It is the defining issue of our age. It is the central challenge of our century,” Guterres asserted.
The opening of the Sharm El-Sheikh Climate Implementation Summit SCIS during the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, on Nov. 7, 2022. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned global leaders of the current climate challenges. “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator,” he said, adding “the planet is fast approaching the tipping point that will make climate chaos irreversible.” (Sui Xiankai/Xinhua via Getty)
Therefore, it is “unacceptable, outrageous, and self-defeating to put it on the back burner,” he said. “Indeed, many of today’s conflicts are linked with growing climate chaos.”
“And the war in Ukraine has exposed the profound risks of our fossil fuel addiction and today’s crisis cannot be an excuse for backsliding or greenwashing,” he declared.
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