Melting faster than feared due to climate change: the world’s glaciers, here in Los Glaciares National Park near El Calafate, Argentina
Image: AP
If we still want to save the climate, the world has to get rid of its addiction to oil, gas and coal. The Russian war does just the opposite.
Putin’s war is a catastrophe – for the people in Ukraine, but also for the world climate. Because it reinforces the impression that the world urgently needs replacements for Russian oil, gas and coal from other parts of the world should the West impose a total energy embargo on Putin. It’s the old story: we can’t do without fossil fuels if the wheels don’t stand still and the poor aren’t supposed to get even poorer. At the same time, as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has now made clear in a speech to the international community, nothing would be more harmful and shameful than continuing to spin this story.
In New York, Guterres commented on the last of three parts of the IPCC’s sixth assessment report without mincing his words, even if his performance threatened to be lost in view of the horrific images from Butscha. He called the climate scientists’ balance sheet a “catalog of shame” for mankind, because all national promises have so far not brought us any closer to saving the climate. The dangerous radicals, according to Guterres, are not the activists who want to save the earth’s climate, but those countries and companies that continue to produce oil, gas and coal as if this were the most natural thing in the world.