The head of the United Nations launched a tirade against fossil fuel companies Thursday, accusing them of betraying future generations and undermining efforts to phase out a product he called “incompatible with human survival.”
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Secretary-General António Guterres also dismissed suggestions by some oil executives — including the man tapped to chair this year’s international climate talks in Dubai — that fossil fuel firms can keep up production if they find a way to capture planet-warming carbon emissions. He warned that this would just make them “more efficient planet-wreckers.”
It’s not the first time the UN chief has called out Big Oil over its role in causing global warming, but the blunt attack reflects growing frustration at the industry’s recent profit bonanza despite warnings from scientists that burning fossil fuels will push the world far beyond any safe climate threshold.
“Last year, the oil and gas industry reaped a record $4 trillion windfall in net income,” Guterres said after a meeting with civil society groups. “Yet for every dollar it spends on oil and gas drilling and exploration, only 4 cents went to clean energy and carbon capture — combined.”
“Trading the future for thirty pieces of silver is immoral,” he said.
Guterres called on the industry to put forward a credible plan for shifting to clean energy “and away from a product incompatible with human survival.”
Investing their massive profits instead in renewable energy would allow the industry “to survive the transition and remain very important and relevant actors in the world economy,” he said.
Fossil fuel companies have lately pushed the idea that they should be allowed to keep pumping oil and gas out of the ground as long as they remove greenhouse gas emissions in the process, a suggestion experts reject as too complicated and…
