“The world must phase out fossil fuels in a just and equitable way—moving to leave oil, coal, and gas in the ground where they belong and massively boosting renewable investment in a just transition,” António Guterres said.
As United Nations climate talks came to a disappointing conclusion in Germany on Thursday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres delivered remarks in New York City targeting “the polluted heart of the climate crisis: the fossil fuel industry.”
Guterres’ comments came just after he met with civil society leaders and ahead of his September Climate Ambition Summit in NYC, which is set to be followed in November by the U.N. conference COP28, hosted by the United Arab Emirates in Dubai.
“Countries are far off track in meeting climate promises and commitments. I see a lack of ambition. A lack of trust. A lack of support. A lack of cooperation. And an abundance of problems around clarity and credibility,” he said. “The climate agenda is being undermined. At a time when we should be accelerating action, there is backtracking. At a time when we should be filling gaps, those gaps are growing.”
“Meanwhile, the human rights of climate activists are being trampled. The most vulnerable are suffering the most,” Guterres continued, noting that current policies put the world on track for a 2.8°C temperature rise by the end of the century, nearly double the 2015 Paris climate agreement’s more ambitious 1.5°C goal. Hitting the higher number, he said, “spells catastrophe.”
“Yet the collective response remains pitiful. We are hurtling towards disaster, eyes wide open—with far too many willing [to bet it] all on wishful thinking, unproven technologies, and silver bullet solutions,” he declared. “It’s time to wake up and step up. It’s time to rebuild trust based on climate justice. It’s time to accelerate the just transition to a green economy.”
“It’s time to wake up and step up. It’s time to rebuild trust based on climate justice. It’s time to accelerate the just transition to a green economy.”
While acknowledging the important roles of governments and financial institutions—particularly from the Global No[r]th—in the worldwide transition to renewables, Guterres also said that “the fossil fuel industry and its enablers have a special responsibility.”
“The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions. It’s fossil fuels—period,” he said in what was widely seen as a rebuke of recent remarks from Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, whose selection as COP28’s president-designate is controversial around the world given that he is also the UAE’s industry minister and CEO of the country’s Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
“The solution is clear: The world must phase out fossil fuels in a just and equitable way—moving to leave oil, coal, and gas in the ground where they belong and massively boosting renewable investment in a just transition,” Guterres asserted. However, just a tiny fraction of the oil and gas industry’s record $4 trillion windfall last year was put toward a clean future.
Stressing that “the world needs the industry to apply its massive resources to drive, not obstruct, the global move from fossil fuels to renewables,” Guterres called for “credible” transition plans “that chart a company’s move to clean energy—and away from a product incompatible with human survival.”
“Otherwise, they are just proposals to become more efficient planet-wreckers,” he said. Condemning plans that “rely on dubious offsets,” the U.N. leader said that they “must include reducing emissions from production, processing, transmission, refining, distribution, and use.”
While the press conference was far from the first time Guterres has called out the fossil fuel industry, his comments were lauded by campaigners preparing for a global mobilization in September, planned for just before the U.N. chief’s summit.
“The U.N. secretary-general’s speech echoes the call from people from across the world today demanding an end to the era of fossil fuels,” said Alex Rafalowicz, executive director of the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty Initiative. “The time for rhetoric, empty promises, and greenwashing is over.”
“Governments must work together to put in place an action plan to move away from dependence on oil, gas, and coal in the fairest and fastest way possible,” Rafalowicz added. “We will be on the streets to ensure peoples’ demands are carried into the negotiation halls in September. Climate impacts are escalating, fossil fuel corporations are digging in, but people are stepping up to end fossil fuels; fair, fast, and forever.”
Guterres’ remarks came as negotiators finished gathering in the German city of Bonn to prepare for COP28.
Oil Change International (OCI) global policy lead Romain Ioualalen said Thursday that “this speech by the U.N. secretary-general is a wake-up call for the countries that wasted two weeks arguing over procedural matters at the Bonn climate conference instead of charting a path towards a COP28 decision to phase out fossil fuels.”
“Countries must step up and fulfill the promises they made in Paris in 2015 to halt fossil fuel expansion and agree to a fair, fast, and full transition away from oil, gas, and coal and towards renewables,” Ioualalen continued. “Over 70 countries have called for a COP28 decision on fossil fuel phaseout in Bonn. Countries like Colombia and the members of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance are doing the hard work of implementing measures to keep oil and gas in the ground.”
“The contrast between this leadership and the actions of the world’s biggest historic polluter, the United States, could not be more striking,” he argued, adding that under President Joe Biden, “the U.S. has failed in its responsibility to lead a global and just transition away from fossil fuels and avert further climate disaster and has instead actively promoted fossil fuel expansion including with public money.”
OCI was among over 500 groups that sent a letter Thursday to Biden and leaders of key U.S. federal agencies demanding executive action “to stop expanding oil, gas, and coal production, the core driver of the climate emergency,” by the September summit.
Suella Braverman forced through new anti-protest laws after slow-marching demonstrations from Just Stop Oil activists in London
At midnight last night, the right to protest in England and Wales became a matter of police discretion.
Yesterday, the police could restrict or stop a protest to prevent it causing either “serious public disorder, serious damage to property, or significant and prolonged disruption to the life of the community”.
Those powers already allowed plenty of room for interpretation, but from today the threshold is even lower. This week, home secretary Suella Braverman forced through new laws in a way never seen before in the UK. Here’s what you need to know.
What are the new police powers targeting protests?
Changes to the Public Order Act mean police can now restrict or stop a protest if they believe it could cause “more than minor disruption to the life of the community”. They have the power to arrest anyone taking part in a protest, or even anyone encouraging others to take part.
Officers are also now required to consider “cumulative disruption” from protest, even if the protests in question are organised by different people and about different issues. And the definition of “community” has been changed to include anyone affected by a protest, not just people who live or work in the area it’s happening in.
“The regulations also say the police will be required to take into account all relevant disruption. For example, if there are regular traffic jams in the area, that would have to be taken into account [when the police decide whether to ban a protest], even if it had nothing to do with the protest”, Jodie Beck, policy and campaigns officer at Liberty told openDemocracy.
Braverman argued the new laws were needed to target slow-marching protests from climate activists Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion.
What do they mean?
In reality, the police could find a way to argue that any protest meets the threshold for imposing restrictions, if they wanted to. The new law, says Beck, is a “huge expansion of police powers” that could also lead to police allowing some protests to go ahead while imposing restrictions on others, simply based on how the officers felt about the message behind them.
While the government has focused on one particular type of protest – slow-marching – all protests are potentially impacted.
Beck gives the example of striking railway workers and their supporters holding a rally outside a train station. The police “could decide that means a more than minor disruption to people’s travel,” and so ban the gathering, and arrest anyone taking part.
It could even be that police officers rule that a picket line causes “more than minor” disruption to the workplace it is picketing – after all, that’s the point.
But it’s not just the new laws which have shocked experts. It’s also how they came about this week.
How did the new laws restricting protests get passed?
Originally, Suella Braverman tried to sneak the new legislation into the Public Order Act, which passed earlier this year and came into effect just before the coronation. Rather than allowing these changes to face the usual scrutiny in the House of Commons, the home secretary had them added as last minute amendments to the bill in the House of Lords, after MPs had already voted on it. Her attempt failed – the Lords thought these measures were too draconian and voted them down, though they approved the broader new bill.
Undeterred, Braverman turned to a constitutional trick that’s never been used before. Because while new bills – known as ‘primary legislation’ – require line-by-line scrutiny in both houses, various laws already on the statute book give ministers powers to make small changes via something called ‘secondary legislation’. And secondary legislation doesn’t get nearly as much scrutiny, with both the Commons and Lords simply voting for or against.
The home secretary argued that another act passed last year by then-home secretary Priti Patel – the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act – already gave her the power to make these changes via secondary legislation. So that’s what she did this week, making it the first time ever that a government has used secondary legislation to push through a measure that had already been voted down by parliament.
The secondary legislation passed through the Commons on Monday, with the Tories taking full advantage of their majority. In the Lords, Green peer Jenny Jones filed a highly unusual fatal motion, a rare procedure used to try and kill off the passage of a bill. Normally, because it’s an unelected house, the Lords tweaks legislation passed by the Commons, but doesn’t ultimately vote it down. Jones argued that, because the government was bringing back a law which had already been voted down by parliament through a route which requires almost no scrutiny, this should be an exception.
Labour, although they complained about Braverman’s shenanigans, refused to back Jones, and abstained on the motion, meaning it passed. Police, Crime and Fire minister Chris Philp then enacted the new measures from midnight last night (secondary legislation doesn’t need royal assent). And so now, the police can shut down any protest they like.
The story doesn’t end there. Liberty is taking the government to court, calling the move “unlawful” and arguing that it broke many of the basic principles of the British constitution.
What do human rights campaigners say?
Katy Watts, a lawyer at Liberty, accused the government of “putting itself above the law” and said the move gives police “almost unlimited powers to stop any protest the government doesn’t agree with”.
And Beck believes we need to see this in the context of a much broader attack on our democratic rights. Noisy protests have been banned. The government is already attacking the right to strike, making it easier for bosses to sack people who vote to withdraw their labour. They’ve made it harder to vote, and harder to challenge them in the courts.
“Even if you’ve never been to a protest, you never know when you might need to,” she said.
With the new laws, there is a growing chance you’ll be arrested if you do.
Standing in a sunny Parliament Square surrounded by a colourful mix of trade union flags, Mick Lynch spoke to LFF about the troubling state of democracy in Britain.
The RMT general secretary was a speaker at the emergency protest organised ahead of the final Parliament vote on the anti-strike legislation, Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill.
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For Lynch, the anti-strike legislation comes under a broader attempt by the Tory government to clamp down on any kind of opposition, warning that a threat to trade union power is a threat to democracy.
“The government has got an attitude towards anything they don’t agree with, any kind of dissent. It could be politically or more broadly socially, where if they don’t agree with people, they try to ban them,” said Lynch.
“We got these police bills and these counter-demonstration bills where people will be stopped from demonstrating or protesting.
“We saw that during the coronation, one of the most passive pieces of civil disobedience if you like, was banned in effect and people were put in jail for the day.
“They’re trying to clamp down on any dissent, and I think that’s a very troubling state, and it’s time for the British people to wake up to that and see that if trade unions, which are an organic part of life and grow in every society, if they’re not allowed to function properly, democracy in this country is in a lot of trouble.
“We’ve got to make sure that people are out opposing that and we’ve got to make sure that people understand the issues.
The legislation is an attempt to ‘drive a wedge between working people’
General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) Paul Nowak took to the airwaves this morning to speak out about the anti-strikes bill which will be voted on by MPs this evening.
He slammed media accusations of union ‘scare tactics’ by laying out the reality of the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill which could see workers lose their job for taking strike action.
As media presenters sought to play down the implications of the bill, Nowak said threatening workers with the sack was ‘untenable’ and that the real reason it was being put through was to ‘demonise trade unions’ and ‘drive a wedge between working people’.
“There is no public appetite at all to see nurses, paramedics, teachers, railway [ workers …] sacked for exercising what most people will think as a fundamental British liberty, the right to strike,” Nowak said on Sky News.
“To remove it would put the UK as a real international outlier.”
