he is clearly and rightly frightened, in a way few other world leaders seem to be. For one thing, he has spent a lot of time being briefed by scientific panels such as the U.N.-affiliated I.P.C.C. If Guterres’s courageous directness is unusual, it’s also hugely important. This is certainly the truth, but it too often goes unspoken. Secretary-General is saying that the central problem with climate change is the fossil-fuel industry’s product, that the industry is immorally undermining climate action, and that, if it continues, it should be shut down. It is time to stop burning our planet.” A few months on, he returned to the theme: “It is immoral for oil & gas companies to be making record profits from the current energy crisis on the backs of the poorest, at a massive cost to the climate.” Some government & business leaders are saying one thing but doing another. ![]() It’s a stupid investment-leading to billions in stranded assets.” A little later, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest study, he tweeted that it represented “a litany of broken climate promises. Their support for coal could not only cost the world its climate goals. Last year, in a speech to The Economist’s sustainability summit, he said, “Those in the private sector still financing coal must be held to account. In 2019, the Financial Times reported, major nations that continued to support the coal industry, which Guterres had taken a firm stance against, would not be invited to address the U.N.’s Climate Action Summit. Indeed, for the past few years he’s been more outspoken than almost any other world leader about the fossil-fuel industry. This is not the first time that Guterres has spoken so frankly. We need a renewables revolution, not a self-destructive fossil fuel resurgence. He begins by saying, in a sentence typed in bold in the official transcript, “ We must end the merciless, relentless, senseless war on nature.” That war, he continues, “is putting our world at immediate risk of hurtling past the 1.5-degree temperature increase limit and now still moving towards a deadly 2.8 degrees.” Hence: So I’m going to quote at some length from his talk today, concentrating on the section about global warming and the environment. And, since Guterres is the world’s top diplomat, one might expect that he would be a master of this form of address. ![]() We’re used to the idea that “diplomatic language” is filled with euphemisms-“a full and frank exchange of views,” and so on. ![]() If you’re struggling to remember the name of the current Secretary-General, it’s António Guterres, who came to the job after, among other things, serving as the Prime Minister of Portugal. On Monday morning, at the United Nations, the Secretary-General delivered his annual report on priorities-a kind of State of the Planet address.
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