Climate Leaders Summit Needs to Deliver Bold Action to Phase Out Fossil Fuels
Washington, DC — Being a climate leader means keeping all fossil fuels in the ground and accelerating a just transition for workers and communities. US President Biden and other heads of state from major emitting countries gathered at the Climate Leadership Summit today cannot claim leadership unless they commit to phasing out oil and gas, ending subsidies for fossil fuels, investing in job-creating, clean energy alternatives, and stepping up financing for those communities hardest hit by climate change, without generating new debt.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Keeping global temperature rise below 1.5°C requires reducing fossil fuel production by at least 6% annually from now through 2030. Instead, countries are planning to increase production, supplying twice as much oil, gas, and coal as is consistent with the 1.5°C limit.
The world is watching whether the targets announced this week, ahead of COP-26 in Glasgow, will do anything to alter the current global trajectory toward climate catastrophe.
The following is a statement from Nikki Reisch, Director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Center for International Environmental Law:
If summits are political theater, Biden’s climate gathering will be a tragedy unless governments commit to phasing out all fossil fuels.
After decades of inaction, we don’t need more long-term “net zero” commitments that rely on accounting tricks and unproven technologies like carbon capture and storage, which prolong, rather than replace, fossil fuel use. Delaying transformative change will only continue to shift the burden to future generations. We need zero fossil fuel emissions. As over 100 Nobel Prize winners, including the Dalai Lama, have urged, world leaders need to accelerate the phaseout of fossil fuels — including gas.
Addressing the climate emergency requires multilateral action, but it is not enough to bring states together for self-congratulatory statements. The world needs to see governments take bold, concrete steps commensurate with the scale and scope of the climate emergency. That means immediately halting oil and gas expansion and urgently increasing investment in a just transition that centers the Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities and workers on the frontlines of climate change.
For the world’s wealthiest polluters, whose (in)action has created the current crisis, changing course means doing their fair share to combat climate change and its mounting toll. Practically, this translates into urgently reducing their emissions at home and abroad and increasing international support to those adapting to the changing climate and hardest hit by climate-induced loss and damage. This focus on equity and support to those most affected must be front-and-center at COP-26 later this year.
Government plans must focus not only on where the world needs to be decades from now but on how we get there in the immediate future. Until then, Summits like this — that merely provide platforms for the largest polluters to make more promises — will continue to be an exercise in theatrics.
###
Released: April 22, 2021
Media contact: Cate Bonacini, press (at) ciel.org