Image: 360ber – Depositphotos.António Guterres (UN Secretary General): “Fossil fuel companies have humanity at their throats”.
António Guterres compares climate inaction to tobacco companies dismissing the link between smoking and cancer.
Fossil fuel companies and the banks that finance them »they have humanity at their throatsThe UN secretary-general said, in a “brutal” attack on the industry, which is making record profits amid Ukraine’s war-torn energy prices.
António Guterres compared fossil fuel companies to tobacco companieswho continued to promote their addictive products while hiding or attacking health advice showing a clear link between smoking and cancer.
We seem to be trapped in a world where fossil fuel producers and financiers have humanity by the throat. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has invested heavily in pseudoscience and public relations, with a false narrative to downplay its responsibility for climate change and undermine ambitious climate policies.
They exploited precisely the same outrageous tactics as Big Tobacco decades ago. Like tobacco interests, fossil fuel interests and their financial accomplices must not shirk responsibility.
Antonio Guterres
Speaking at the Major Economies Forum, a climate conference hosted by the White House, Guterres also attacked governments that fail to curb fossil fuels and, in many cases, seek to increase gas production, oil and even coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. .
There is nothing more clear or present than the danger of fossil fuel expansion. Even in the short term, fossil fuels make no political or economic sense.
Antonio Guterres
Guterres is understood to be furious that, six months after the Cop26 climate summit and following three disastrous reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the “sternest warning yet” from climate scientists), countries and companies are ignoring science and missing opportunities to put the world on a greener path, when renewable energy is cheaper and safer than fossil fuels.