Posted on 5 December 2020 by John Hartz

Editor's Choice

UN secretary general: humanity faces climate 'suicide' without US rejoining Paris agreement

Joining China and other big polluters, Biden’s pledge of ‘net zero’ emissions by 2050 brings the Paris agreement goals ‘within reach’

UN Secretary General António Guterres

“The way we are moving is a suicide,” the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, said in an interview on Monday, and humanity’s survival will be “impossible” without the United States rejoining the Paris agreement and achieving “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, as the incoming Biden administration has pledged.

The secretary general said that “of course” he had been in touch with President-elect Biden and looked forward to welcoming the US into a “global coalition for net zero by 2050” that the UN has organized. The US is the world’s largest cumulative source of heat-trapping emissions and its biggest military and economic power, Guterres noted, so “there is no way we can solve the [climate] problem … without strong American leadership.”

In an extraordinary if largely unheralded diplomatic achievement, most of the world’s leading emitters have already joined the UN’s “net zero by 2050” coalition, including the European Union, Japan, the United Kingdom and China (which is the world’s largest source of annual emissions and has committed to achieving carbon neutrality “before 2060”). India, meanwhile, the world’s third largest annual emitter, is the only Group of 20 country on track to limit temperature rise to 2C by 2100, despite needing to lift many of its people out of poverty, an achievement Guterres called “remarkable”. Along with Russia, the US has been the only major holdout, after Donald Trump announced he was withdrawing the US from the Paris agreement soon after becoming president four years ago.

Click here to access the entire article as originally published on The Guardian's website.  

UN secretary general: humanity faces climate 'suicide' without US rejoining Paris agreement by Mark Hertsgaard, Environment, The Guardian, Dec 2, 2020

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