Action on climate change

Jun 06, 2024 Editorial

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Kaieteur News – United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres yesterday again made a fiery pitch for action to curb fossil fuel use and argued that the industry should be banned from advertising to help save the world from climate change. In a speech at the American Museum of Natural History in New York to mark World Environment Day, Guterres called coal, oil and gas corporations the “godfathers of climate chaos” who had distorted the truth and deceived the public for decades.  He again urged the transition to renewables as one way to save the planet.

According to a BBC News report, on Wednesday, new studies showed the rate of warming is increasing and that global heat records have continued to tumble. The BBC said data from the EU’s climate service confirms that each of the past 12 months set a new global temperature record for the time of year. The high temperatures were driven by human-caused climate change, although they were also given a small boost by the El Niño climate phenomenon. The BBC report said that while a fading El Niño should soon bring a pause to the record-breaking sequence of months, temperatures will continue to rise in the long-term due to emissions of planet-warming gases from human activities. Last year was the hottest on record and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Wednesday that the record could fall again as soon as this year. A group of around 50 leading scientists separately reported that the rate of global warming caused by humans has continued to increase. They found that ongoing high emissions of warming gases mean the world is moving closer to breaching the symbolic 1.5C warming mark on a longer-term basis. To try to avert this outcome, the UN Secretary General has called for more rapid political action on climate change, and a “clampdown” on the fossil fuel industry.

Renewables is the direction in which more places on this planet are leaning with conviction and strength. It is a matter of economics, and of survival also. For when there is an endangered planet, an already wounded one in many areas, then the instinct for self-preservation takes over, and towers over all other considerations. Thus, renewables are gaining more and more traction, and increasingly come across as the alternative to be pursued.

The UN is pushing hard towards this kind of thinking. It makes for wisdom, given what the science of climate change has proven beyond argument, other than those from mega oil company leaders. The fact that it is cheaper and cleaner are among the chief selling points. Many countries are climbing on to that bandwagon because they have been hurt repeatedly by the volatile nature of fossil fuels, inclusive of its supply, its prices, and its power and record for holding whole nations, if not hemispheres, to ransom. In other words, fossil fuels can be too easily weaponised and the world has grown impatient with being victimised from time to time.

This kind of talk and this degree of insistence surrounding moving away from fossil fuels pose a problem for Guyana. As a new oil producer, there is great enthusiasm to capitalise on our good fortune, which has its merits. After all, the oil staying in the ground is not a sensible posture, not with a poverty-stricken nation looking eagerly at its expected prosperities. The urge to produce oil, and as much of it as quickly as such can be done, has taken hold of leaders. It is going in a direction different from that being pressed for by the world, and is already attracting much attention.

Our position at this paper is simple, and we believe that it is wise – we must take advantage of our oil and gas wealth with an eye to the leadership temperature in the global environment, but with the necessary benefits in place in both the financial and environmental spheres.

The talk is of transition, and from many authoritative sources. Our own regional Caribbean Development Bank head has called for this transition, but that it must be prudent. The region must go about it carefully, but not as slowly as has been the case. There must be acceleration, and the answer is in a combination of fossils and renewables, with more intense weaning away from the former.

Our oil leader, Vice President Jagdeo disagrees. It is our gift, and we must make use of it, hence, we must produce, regardless of what the rest of the world is doing. Interestingly, this former Champion of the Earth is now a dogged fossil fuel convert. Strangely, he says that renewables using solar, wind and water sources are “very, very expensive” (KN June 21, 2022) when compared to the greater than US$2B Gas-to-Energy (GTE) project he prefers. We still don’t know the final cost of that GTE project, yet he makes the comparison with such thoughtless zeal. It is either that he is missing the boat or, as Guyanese say, the boat already gone over falls.

 

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• António Guterres, Guterres called coal, Natural History, New York, United Nations Secretary-General, victimised, World Environment Day

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