UN Secretary-General Says the World Must Turbocharge the Fossil Fuel Phaseout

Ongoing deadly heat waves around the world, set against the backdrop of a seemingly endless series of annual, monthly and daily heat records on every continent and ocean, prompted United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to make an urgent call to “turbo charge” cuts to fossil fuels. 

“All countries must deliver by next year nationally determined contributions, or national climate action plans, aligned to limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” Guterres said Thursday to the press in New York. Three days after the Earth recorded its hottest day ever on Monday, at a global average surface temperature of 17.15 degrees Celsius, he reminded 196 countries of their Paris climate agreement pledges. 

The current plans add up to about 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming above the pre-industrial average by 2100. That’s well above the Paris Agreement’s goal of capping warming as close to 1.5 degrees as possible and into the realm of extremely dangerous heating, with nearly unsurvivable heatwaves, crop failures and more severe floods and droughts. 

Those are the symptoms of the climate crisis, and “to tackle all these symptoms, we need to fight the disease,” he said. “The disease is the madness of incinerating our only home. The disease is the addiction to fossil fuels. The disease is climate inaction.”

In particular, he said developed countries must lead the way in cutting fossil fuel emissions and shifting funding away from oil and gas and toward renewables. But instead, many are doing the opposite, including the United States which has increased fossil fuel production to the highest level ever.

“I must call out the flood of fossil fuel expansion we are seeing in some of the world’s wealthiest countries,” Guterres said. “In signing such a surge of new oil and gas licenses, they are signing away our future.”

The warnings were reinforced by a new report on heat impacts, showing a global average of 489,000 annual heat-related deaths between 2000 and 2019, with 45 percent of the deaths in Asia and 36 percent in Europe. 

The report, United Nations Secretary-General’s Call to Action on Extreme Heat, was compiled by 10 specialized U.N. entities, including those focused on agriculture, health, biodiversity, cultural heritage, disaster risk reduction and meteorology showing heat impacts to every aspect of life all over the world. 

Globally, 2.41 billion workers, 70 percent of the working population, are exposed to excessive heat, the report found. Poor people, older people and people with pre-existing health conditions, as well as pregnant women, infants and young children, are especially vulnerable to heat, and more must be done to protect them given the near-certainty of worsening heatwaves in the years ahead, the report noted, citing the IPCC.

The report emphasizes focusing on four areas: Caring for the vulnerable; protecting workers; boosting the resilience of economies and societies using data and science: and limiting the average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Also worrying is that the world’s cities are heating up at twice the global average rate, with rapid urbanization leading to more concentration of heat in urban areas, where more than half the world’s population lives.

“As the world is heating up faster than anticipated, cities are bearing the brunt, as congestion, the built environment and concentrated energy use trap and amplify temperatures,” the U.N. authors wrote.

“This is exactly what climate science told us would happen if the world continued burning coal, oil and gas,” said Joyce Kimutai, a climate scientist at Imperial College, London, adding that it will keep getting hotter until the world stops burning fossil fuels. “People are suffering as the world heats up,” she said. “The suffering will only become greater as long as emissions continue.”

More Heat, More Extremes

It’s not just the heat, said Akshay Deoras, a research scientist with the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading. Human-caused warming is also intensifying extremes of the water cycle, with more floods and more droughts.

The report was released just two days after scientists reported that Earth as a whole had experienced its warmest day on record, with the average surface temperature at just over 17 degrees Celsius. The last 13 consecutive months have all set records and the planet also just experienced its first stretch of 12 consecutive months exceeding the 1.5 degrees of warming that the Paris climate agreement set as a temperature limit.

“At present, warmer than normal weather conditions are being witnessed across all continents of our planet,” Deoras said. “So, the warming pattern responsible for the record temperature on July 21 seems to be more or less uniform across the planet.”

“We know what is driving it,” Guterres said. “Fossil fuel-charged, human-induced climate change.”

He listed some of the most recent horrific impacts of extreme heat, including a reported 1,300 deaths during the Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, in a region where temperatures have been climbing to 40, and even topping 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit).

In the United States, he said, warmth was so widespread and oppressive that 120 million people were under heat warnings, while heat-related school closures in Africa and Asia affected more than 80 million children.

Heat stress at work is projected to cost the global economy $2.4 trillion by 2030, up from $280 billion in the mid-1990s. He said that as daily temperatures rise above 34 degrees Celsius, labor productivity drops by 50 percent.

He said the next round of national climate action plans, which are due in 2025 under the Paris Agreement, must show how developed countries will cut global consumption and production of fossil fuels by thirty percent by 2030. 

“We need similar 1.5-aligned transition plans from business, the financial sector, cities and regions,” he added. 

Developed countries, specifically the G20, are facing a “dangerous reality,” said Paris Agreement co-architect Christiana Figueres, who oversaw U.N. climate negotiations from 2010 to 2016, and the co-founder of Global Optimism, a U.K.-based civic organization promoting a culture of optimism and collaboration to tackle the climate crisis.

Rich countries with strong economies must address the climate crisis decisively, with policies to accelerate the deployment of renewables and prudently phaseout fossil fuels.

“One third of global electricity can be produced by solar and wind alone,” she said. “But targeted national policies have to enable that transformation. Or we all scorch and fry.”