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‘Highway to climate hell’: UN chief calls for coal phase-out at COP 27

“We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator,” Guterres said

The United Nations secretary general Antonio Guterres warned attendees at the COP27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, that the world is on a highway to climate hell while also repeating his call to phase-out coal by the year 2040.

“We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator,” Guterres said.

“Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing, global temperatures keep rising, and our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible,” Guterres, who was speaking , added.

“We are in the fight of our lives, and we are losing,” Guterres warned.

The UN chief also said the war Ukraine and other conflicts had “caused so much bloodshed and violence and had dramatic impacts all over the world.”

“But we cannot … accept that our attention is not focused on climate change.”

While collaboration was needed to bolster peace efforts and end “tremendous suffering,” climate change was “on a different timeline, and a different scale.”

“It is the defining issue of our age. It is the central challenge of our century. It is unacceptable, outrageous and self-defeating to put it on the back burner.”

Many of the conflicts taking place around the world, Guterres said, were “linked with growing climate chaos.”

The war in Ukraine had exposed “the profound risks of our fossil fuel addiction” and the crises of today could not, he argued, be used as an excuse for “backsliding or greenwashing.”