The U.N. Secretary-General’s Searing Message for the Fossil-Fuel Industry

On Monday morning, at the United Nations, the Secretary-General delivered his annual report on priorities—a kind of State of the Planet address. 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. We’re used to the idea that “diplomatic language” is filled with euphemisms—“a full and frank exchange of views,” and so on. And, since Guterres is the world’s top diplomat, one might expect that he would be a master of this form of address. So I’m going to quote at some length from his talk today, concentrating on the section about global warming and the environment.

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:

We need disruption to end the destruction.

No more baby steps.

No more excuses.

No more greenwashing.

No more bottomless greed of the fossil fuel industry and its enablers.

He continues in the same vein, ending with this excoriation of the fossil-fuel industry, which has enjoyed record returns, in large part because of the war in Ukraine:

I have a special message for fossil-fuel producers and their enablers scrambling to expand production and raking in monster profits: If you cannot set a credible course for net-zero, with 2025 and 2030 targets covering all your operations, you should not be in business.

Your core product is our core problem.

We need a renewables revolution, not a self-destructive fossil fuel resurgence.

This is not the first time that Guterres has spoken so frankly. Indeed, for the past few years he’s been more outspoken than almost any other world leader about the fossil-fuel industry. 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. 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. Their support for coal could not only cost the world its climate goals. 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. Some government & business leaders are saying one thing but doing another. They are lying. 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.”

Just to be clear, the U.N. 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. This is certainly the truth, but it too often goes unspoken. If Guterres’s courageous directness is unusual, it’s also hugely important. 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.; he is clearly and rightly frightened, in a way few other world leaders seem to be. And, for another, Guterres has as much claim for speaking on behalf of the world as anyone. He is, after all, appointed by the representatives of the whole globe; his writ, such as it is, crosses borders. He appears to owe no particular allegiance to companies or tycoons, and he truly represents the most vulnerable people in the most vulnerable places. He clearly understands that, in twenty or fifty or a hundred years’ time, the main thing humans will remember about this era is that it marked the moment when temperatures began to spike. What we do in response is the one decision, among the thousands of daily political battles over spy balloons and semiconductor sanctions, that will really matter for the deep history of the Earth.

Guterres is not entirely alone in this forthrightness. There’s Pope Francis, whose encyclical, “Laudato Si’,” now closing in on eight years old, remains the most important document of the millennium on the climate crisis, and indeed among the best critiques ever issued on capitalism, consumerism, and our strained and unequal modernity. It’s a long document, but, if you wanted to summarize it in one of the Pope’s sentences, you could do worse than: “The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”

And then there’s Al Gore, a Nobel laureate and among the people most responsible for bringing news of the climate crisis to the world, with the 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” The former senator and Vice-President (a man partly raised in a D.C. hotel, because his father was a senator, too) gave a talk at the Davos World Economic Forum last month that can more accurately be described as a rant—an absolutely correct and remarkably red-faced rant. Whenever there’s legislation proposed to deal with climate change, Gore said, “the oil-and-gas industry and the coal industry come in and fight it tooth and nail, and they use their legacy network of political influence and wealth to stop progress.” If we are ever to “stop using the sky as an open sewer,” Gore added, “we cannot let the oil companies and gas companies and petrostates tell us what is permissible.”

All of this straight talk and truthtelling is crucially important right now, not just because the world is enduring enormous and unnatural disasters but because these disasters coincide with a man-made flood of obfuscation. Much of that flood is the “greenwashing” that Guterres decries—the efforts of big banks and oil companies to pretend that they’re making progress on climate when they’re not—and some of it is the strange wave of nonsense washing over us in ever greater quantities since Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.

Musk took control of the social-media platform just before the midterm elections, which were a small triumph for clear thinking, with voters seeming to reject, if by scarily narrow margins, lies about voter fraud. It appeared as if the country might be moving past one of the worst aspects of the Trump legacy: the dismissal of rational thinking as “fake news.” But, in the months since, Twitter has reinstated many formerly banned usersand recent studies have found that it has become more of a repository for precisely this kind of misinformation. As the Guardian reported“the term #ClimateScam [is] now regularly the first result that appears on Twitter when ‘climate’ is searched on the site.” (Twitter did not respond to media requests for comment; a similar rise has been reported on other social-media platforms that have relaxed some of their filtering policies.)