MANILA, Philippines — The United Nations has called on governments to make four shifts, including tax pollution to advance climate action.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said emphasis should be placed on taxes on carbon emissions, known as carbon pricing, instead of on salaries.
He called for a stop to subsidizing fossil fuels and stressed that taxpayer money should not be used to increase the frequency of hurricanes, spread of drought and heatwaves, the melting of glaciers and bleaching of corals.
The UN also called for a stop to the building of new coal plants by 2020.
Coal-based power is key, according to UN-environment’s 2018 Emissions Gap Report: all plants currently in operation are committing the world to around 190 giga tons of CO2, and if all coal power plants currently under construction go into operation and run until the end of their technical lifetime, emissions will increase by another 150 giga tons, jeopardizing the ability to limit global warming by 2°C as agreed upon in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
The UN chief encouraged governments to focus on a green economy not a grey economy.
“It is very important that around the world young people, civil society and those that in the business community have understood that the green economy is the economy of the future and the grey economy has no future,” Guterres said. “It’s very important that you convince governments that they must act because there’s still a lot of resistance.”
He said governments are still afraid to move forward as he deplored explaining that “they feel the costs of climate action, forgetting that the costs of inaction are much bigger than any costs of climate action.”
“Nature does not negotiate,” he added. “It’s very good to see youth in the frontline.”
On Sept. 23, the UN chief is convening a Climate Change Summit to galvanize increased ambition for decisive climate action.
The common central objective is not to have more than 1.5 degrees of increasing temperature at the end of the century.
The international community, as well as the scientific community, has been very clear that there should be carbon neutrality by 2050 to reach this goal.