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By JILL LAWLESS
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told world leaders at the United Nations on Wednesday evening that humanity must “grow up” and fight climate change, saying humans must stop plundering the planet like a teenager on a bender.
Johnson is due to host a major United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in six weeks. He is using a trip to the United Nations General Assembly in New York to lobby governments for tighter emission reduction targets and more money to help poor countries clean up their economies.
In a speech to the General Assembly on Wednesday, he said it was now or never if the world was to meet its goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 ° C above pre-industrial levels.
“If we stay on the current course, temperatures will rise 2.7 degrees or more by the end of the century. And whatever that does to the ice floes, ”Johnson said. “We will see desertification, drought, crop failures and mass movements of humanity on a scale never seen before. Not because of some natural event or some unforeseen disaster, but because of us, because of what we are doing now.
In his speech, Johnson compared humanity to a brash 16-year-old – “just old enough to get us in serious trouble.”
“We’ve come to that fateful age where we pretty much know how to drive and we know how to unlock the drinks cabinet and engage in all kinds of activities that are not only potentially embarrassing but also terminal,” he said. .
“We think someone else is going to clean up the mess we make because that’s what someone else has always done,” he added. “We’re destroying our habitats over and over again with the inductive reasoning we’ve gotten out of it so far, and so we’ll get away with it again.”
“My friends, humanity’s adolescence is drawing to a close,” Johnson said, adding, “We must come together in collective maturity.”
Hopes for a successful Glasgow summit have been bolstered by announcements this week from the world’s two largest economies and biggest carbon polluters, the United States and China. Chinese President Xi Jinping says his country will no longer fund overseas coal-fired power plants, while US President Joe Biden announced a plan to double financial aid for green growth to poorer countries to $ 11.4 billion by 2024.
Britain has pledged to reduce its carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, and Johnson has championed the expansion of renewables, saying the UK could become ‘the Saudi Arabia of the wind’. But he is under fire from environmentalists for not scrapping new North Sea oil drilling and a proposed new coal mine in north-west England.
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