UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has urged world leaders at the COP28 climate summit to plan for a future without fossil fuels, saying there was no other way to curb global warming.
Speaking a day after COP28 President Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber proposed embracing the continued use of fossil fuels, Guterres said: “We cannot save a burning planet with a fire hose of fossil fuels.”
“The 1.5-degree limit is only possible if we ultimately stop burning all fossil fuels. Not reduce. Not abate,” he said on Friday, referring to nascent technologies to capture and store carbon emissions.
The competing visions summed up the difficulty of the UN climate talks in the oil-producing United Arab Emirates, where divisions over fossil fuels and acrimony over lagging financing and geopolitical tensions around the war in Gaza threatened to distract delegates from making progress.
An agreement was reached on Thursday for the creation of a “loss and damage fund” to help poor countries weather the impacts of climate change, which is largely the result of fossil fuel use by rich countries, which have produced a large share of cumulative emissions.
While such a fund has long been sought by developing nations, which stand to lose the most from climate change and have urged richer countries to provide assistance, only $700m was dedicated to the fund. Poor countries had said $100bn is needed.
Original from www.aljazeera.com