Sunday, August 8th, 2021
“New oil fields must come”
Climate summit boss Sharma gets tangled up
Before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change publishes its report on global warming on Monday, the President of the UN climate summit rushes forward and speaks of the “most urgent warning” to date. Embarrassing for Sharma: As a member of the British government, he has to justify new oil fields in the North Sea.
According to the President of the UN climate summit COP26, Alok Sharma, the new status report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the “most urgent warning” of man-made climate change to date. The report, the first part of which is due to be presented on Monday, shows “that human behavior is accelerating global warming in an alarming manner,” said the British State Secretary of the Sunday newspaper “Observer”. “We can’t afford to wait two years, five years, ten years,” Sharma said. The consequences of global warming are already visible: floods in Europe and China, forest fires, record temperatures. “Every day, one way or another, we’re going to see a new record in the world.”
The status reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are considered to be groundbreaking for global climate policy. The first part of the new report deals with the scientific principles of climate change. The underlying question is how the goal of the Paris climate protection agreement can still be achieved, namely to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees if possible, but at least to well below two degrees Celsius.
The IPCC findings are also to be incorporated into the deliberations at the UN climate conference in Glasgow in November. “The COP26 has to be the moment when we do it right,” Sharma told the Observer. A failure of the conference would be “catastrophic, there is no other word”.
UK Government Energy Policy Queries
It became uncomfortable for the British Minister of State when he was asked about his government’s projects in the field of fossil fuels in an interview with the newspaper. Among other things, London wants to develop new oil and gas fields in the North Sea. The projects are in accordance with the legal obligations of Great Britain, insisted Sharma.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) warned in May that the development of new oil and gas reserves would have to be abandoned as early as this year in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. Compared to the pre-industrial age, the earth has already warmed up by 1.1 degrees Celsius, and in Germany by 1.6 degrees.
The 1.5 degree target has already been exceeded in parts of the world; worldwide this is expected around the year 2030 – around ten years earlier than assumed by the IPCC a few years ago. Overall, the earth is currently heading for a warming of around three degrees or more, with serious consequences for people and nature.
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