On highway to climate hell, humanity has a choice - cooperate or perish: UN

Cooperate or perish,” the United Nations chief told dozens of leaders gathered Monday for international climate talks, warning them that the world is “on a highway to climate hell” and urging the two biggest polluting countries, China and the United States, to work together to avert it.

This year’s annual UN climate conference, known as COP27, comes as leaders and experts have raised increasing alarm that time is running out to avert catastrophic rises in temperature.

But the fire and brimstone warnings may not quite have the effect as they have had in past meetings because of multiple other challenges of the moment pulling leaders’ attention — from midterm elections in the US to the Russia-Ukraine war.

“Is it not high time to put an end to all this suffering,” the summit’s host, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, told his fellow leaders. “Climate change will never stop without our intervention... Our time here is limited and we must use every second that we have.” El-Sisi, who called for an end to the Russia-Ukraine war, was gentle compared to a fiery United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who said the world “is on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator”.

French President Emmanuel Macron said the US, China and other non-European rich nations must pay “their share” to help poorer nations deal with climate change.

“We need the United States and China to step up,” Macron said on the sidelines of the COP27 summit in Egypt, AFP reported.

The US, UK, Canada and Australia have fallen billions of dollars short of their “fair share” of climate funding for developing countries, according to a media report.

The assessment, by Carbon Brief, compares the share of international climate finance provided by rich countries with their share of carbon emissions to date, a measure of their responsibility for the climate crisis, The Guardian reported.

The United Arab Emirates will be a responsible supplier of oil and gas for as long as the world needs, its President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan said on Monday at the start of two weeks of climate talks in Egypt.

He added the Gulf nation, which is one of OPEC’s biggest producers but has also invested in renewable energy, was focused on reducing the carbon impact of its fossil fuel output.

“The UAE is considered a responsible supplier of energy and it will continue playing this role for as long as the world is in need of oil and gas,” he said. The global surge in consumer prices may be close to the high point of the current cycle but might yet prove stubborn, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said.

“I’m not going to jump ahead of data, but it is very possible that we are peaking,” Georgieva said, just days before a report that will probably show US inflation for October stayed close to 8%. “We now see central banks very united on fighting inflation as a top priority and rightly so. If we don’t succeed, it would de-anchor and then the foundation for growth which is price stability is dented.”

The UAE will host next year’s UN conference, which will attempt to finalise agreements made last year in Britain and at this year's Egyptian talks.

Many countries with rich resources of oil, gas, and coal have criticized the push for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels arguing it is economically reckless and unfair to poorer and less developed nations keen for economic growth. 

Signatories to the 2015 Paris climate agreement had pledged to achieve a long-term goal of keeping global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the threshold at which scientists say climate change risks spinning out of control.

Guterres said that goal will only stay alive if the world can achieve net zero emissions by 2050. He asked countries to agree to phase out the use of coal, one of the most carbon-intense fuels, by 2040 globally, with members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development hitting that mark by 2030. The head of the International Monetary Fund told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference that climate targets depend on achieving a global carbon price of at least $75 a ton by the end of the decade, and that the pace of change in the real economy was still “way too slow”.

The World Trade Organization, meanwhile, said in a report published on Monday that it should tackle trade barriers for low carbon industries to address the role of global trade in driving climate change.