'Polluters must pay': UN chief urges govt to tax oil giants’ profits to fund climate action

Nations must respond to their failure to rein in global warming by committing to further climate action, the head of the United Nations told world leaders gathered for talks on tackling emissions. Antonio Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations (UN).

(Bloomberg/File)“Science is not telling us to surrender. It is telling us to fight harder,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Wednesday to open a two-day global leaders’ summit alongside the United Nations-convened COP31 climate negotiations in Antalya, Turkey.

The world can no longer prevent global warming exceeding 1.5C, a key threshold staked out by the Paris Agreement, the UN warned last month. Risks from planetary heating have been highlighted this year by tens of thousands of deaths tied to lethal heat waves and wildfires across Europe and a devastating glacier collapse in Nepal.

“The truth is that we have the power to determine how high, how long and how devastating that overshoot will be,” Guterres said. “We have the power to make sure the overshoot is a temporary breach.” Tens of thousands of diplomats, delegates and activists are gathered for the two weeks of talks and faced with a confronting challenge: The world’s work to fund and combat global warming has waned even as its impacts are accelerating.

Dignitaries attending through Thursday include Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Finland’s President Alexander Stubb. However, the US has no official representation for a second year, and top leaders from several major economies including China, India, Germany, and Canada were also absent.

Nine large oil and gas companies had collective profits of about $95 billion in the last quarter, dwarfing the amount available to help the developing world to adapt to climate change and deal with the consequences of increasingly extreme weather, Guterres said.

The UN’s loss and damage fund, which allocates money to developing nations hit by climate disasters, has received about $600 million, equivalent to what fossil fuel companies made in about 14 hours, he said. “It’s time for governments to tax these windfall profits and use the to help vulnerable countries recover,” Guterres said, to mild applause in the summit hall.

“Polluters must pay.”