U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is in Nepal as part of a flying four-day visit and paused Monday to issue the latest in a long string of dire climate warnings, declaring there is no future on the planet for fossil fuel.
“The rooftops of the world are caving in,” Guterres said on a visit to the Everest region in the mountainous country, adding it had lost nearly a third of its ice in just over three decades.
“Glaciers are icy reservoirs –- the ones here in the Himalayas supply fresh water to well over a billion people,” he said, according to AFP. “When they shrink, so do river flows.”
U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres visits the Syangboche in the Everest region of Solukhumbu district on October 30, 2023. (TSHERING SHERPA/AFP via Getty Images)
Guterres went further as he spoke at Syangboche village with Mount Everest towering behind him.
“I am here today to cry out from the rooftop of the world: stop the madness”, Guterres said, before calling an end to fossil fuel usage.
“The glaciers are retreating, but we cannot. We must end the fossil fuel age,” he said.
The message from Nepal is just the latest in a long series of increasingly urgent predictions for the planet issued by the veteran Portuguese socialist.
In July he painted his picture of a world in peril during a streamed speech from U.N. headquarters in New York, returning once more to a theme of climate doom he has used almost without respite since he took office (see below).
U.N. Chief Guterres Declares “Terrifying Era of Global Boiling Has Arrived”
Just last November he told participants in the COP27 climate summit of impending “climate chaos” due to humanity’s “fossil fuel addiction,” as Breitbart News reported.
“We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator,” the career diplomat 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.
Previous to that in 2019 the secretary-general said climate-related devastation is striking the planet on a weekly basis and global action must be undertaken immediately with U.N. agencies in the lead, a message echoed by climate protesters.
“We are here because the world is facing a grave climate emergency,” Guterres told a two-day Abu Dhabi climate meeting ahead of a Climate Action Summit in New York.
“Climate disruption is happening now… It is progressing even faster than the world’s top scientists have predicted,” the U.N. secretary general said. “It is outpacing our efforts to address it. Climate change is running faster than we are.”
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