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US climate envoy John Kerry on Tuesday urged the world to be “very skeptical” of claims made by oil and gas producers that technology will soon allow people to adequately capture the climate-destroying emissions emitted by their cars and planes. and businesses.
“It’s a big question mark,” Carey told The Associated Press about the future viability of carbon capture technology.A debate at the heart of international negotiations on cutting emissions to prevent catastrophic global warming.
The International Energy Agency and a growing number of scientists, governments and world leaders and advocates say that the only way to control climate change fast enough is to stop drilling new oil and gas wells and drastically stop existing drilling.
As many oil companies and oil nations are fighting calls to cut production, emerging carbon capture technology is coming to the rescue. The burning of fossil fuels is a major cause of global warming, and methods to adequately capture the emissions and bring about cost-effective and qualitative changes have not yet been developed.
“Unless it’s proven that it works, we’re very skeptical about this,” Kerry said after a statement at the United Nations Security Council. “We can no longer play games with fossil fuels in the atmosphere.
But this does not mean that the government, corporations and oil and gas producers should not push for advancements in the technology, he said. “If it works, well, you know. But we’ve been hearing about clean coal for 30 years, and how did that happen?”
Kerry told the UN Security Council that the climate crisis is now indisputable – not just for the developed world, but for the entire planet as one of the greatest security threats to life on the planet.
He said it already costs countries billions of dollars every year “just to clean up the tension and, more importantly, it costs the world millions of lives,” including 7 million a year who die from atmospheric pollution.
Kerry stressed that sub-Saharan African countries account for 0.55% of global emissions and 20 countries account for 76%. Everyone promised 10 years ago to keep the temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius, scientists said it was going to be exceeded, but not all of us will do it.
He said, “I came to the United Nations not to point the finger, but to remind all countries to start working together to solve the crisis.” They called for an immediate halt to permitting new coal-fired power plants.
“No country should bring new sources of pollution online, no matter where they come from, so this crisis is knowing what we know,” Kerry said.
Globally, it is not known that any major oil and gas producer is seriously thinking about delaying production, says Hana Fekete, a researcher at the New Climate Institute based in Germany. Despite the Biden administration’s climate commitments, the world’s largest producer, the US, is among those increasing production.
If America is to meet its climate goals, American consumers must dramatically reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, Fakete said.
The United Arab Emirates, which is the host of the United Nations-sponsored climate talks later this year, is among the countries that plan to increase production rather than reduce it.
Kerry called the tightening of U.S. production a “temporary bubble” due to the squeeze on global energy markets caused by the war in Ukraine. America’s increasing demand for electric vehicles and the shift to cleaner energy sources will help take care of that, he said.
“So we are in transition. “The word transition is key to what we’re trying to do,” Carey said.
China should also step up, Kerry said. The country is now on the cusp of fossil fuels, in part due to the continued operation and construction of waste-burning coal-fired power plants.
President Xi Jinping’s government has resisted pressure to quickly phase out coal plants, arguing that China is still a developing country and not subject to the same climate standards as the US and other large Western economies.
“Well, first of all, China is not a poor country,” Kerry said. “So we understand that this is exactly the second largest economy in the world, it is the second largest economy in the world, and they spend a large amount of money in different countries around the world.”
Kerry also made it clear that he would not go to China to talk face-to-face with his climate counterpart Xi Jinping before US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken visited Beijing. Expected in China soon.
Kerry, who was invited to Beijing by Xi, is a key figure in the US-China climate talks, raising concerns about the health of a Chinese official who has raised some past climate findings.
“He’s had a tough time over the past few months, and we wish him well,” Carey said. “He’s a very, very important speaker and he’s very honest and sincere in his commitment, his seriousness. So hopefully the China-US track will start to take off.
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Knickmeier contributed from Washington and Jordan from Berlin.
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