Global Leaders Must Deliver: Phase Out Fossil Fuels Now

November 16, 2022

Sharm El-Sheik — In the middle of the overlapping UN climate negotiations and the G20 summit, Carroll Muffett, President and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law issued the following statement: 

“Amidst an accelerating climate emergency and rapidly shrinking window to stay below 1.5 degrees of warming, it is time to call inertia by its proper name: Failure. In simply recommitting to implement the Glasgow Climate Pact adopted last year, G20 leaders are again refusing to confront the primary driver of climate chaos: fossil fuels. Glasgow’s weak commitments to “phasedown” but not phase out “unabated coal,” and phase out “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies left a tanker-sized loophole for new fossil fuel investments and infrastructure – a fact borne out all too clearly by the G20’s new and accelerating race for gas in Africa and beyond.

“Renewable energy, electrification, energy efficiency, and behavior change give us the tools we need to replace fossil fuels and begin drastically reducing emissions immediately. Extending the world’s reliance on fossil fuels in the misplaced hope we could ”remove“ carbon from the atmosphere at some future point places new and additional risks for ecosystems and communities while locking in more greenhouse emissions for decades to come. Doing so ignores a basic reality of physics: We simply cannot create atmospheric space we no longer have. Carbon capture, carbon removals, and fossil byproducts like blue hydrogen and blue ammonia are dangerous distractions from the urgent task at hand: phasing out fossil fuels.

“There is no scenario in which substituting the former for the latter is ambitious, realistic, or acceptable.”

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