Will Antonio Guterres' anger in Davos shake the oil sector?

The Secretary General of the United Nations denounced the "big lie" of the oil giants on global warming, a few days after the publication of a study on what the American major ExxonMobil knew of this risk forty years ago.

“Some fossil fuel producers were well aware in the 1970s that their flagship product was going to burn the planet.

But like the tobacco industry, they disregarded their own science”, denounced the leader present at the Davos Forum.

According to him, "those responsible must be prosecuted" as the tobacco companies have been.

A reference to the 246 billion dollars that the tobacco giants in the United States had agreed to pay in 1998 to 46 States over a period of 25 years in order to cover the costs incurred to treat former smokers.

Model incompatible with “the survival of the planet”

As early as the 1980s, oil giant ExxonMobil had remarkably accurate global warming predictions made by its own scientists that turned out to be precisely what happened decades later, a study has confirmed. published Thursday in the prestigious journal

Science

.

However, the company has for years publicly cast doubt on the state of scientific knowledge in this area, this publication also pointed out.

“Today, fossil fuel producers and those who support them continue to fight to increase production, knowing full well that their economic model is incompatible with the survival of humanity,” said Antonio Guterres.

"This madness is science fiction, when we know that the collapse of the ecosystem is a pure and hard scientific fact", hammered the secretary general, believing that "we are flirting with climate disaster".



More broadly, the UN secretary-general castigated the "questionable" or "obscure" climate commitments of many companies on a goal of zero carbon emissions.

This "misleads consumers, investors and regulators with false narratives", he said, judging that it opens the door to "greenwashing".

"Our climate commitments require the full commitment of the private sector", he insisted, believing that "the battle to meet the 1.5 degree objective will be won or lost during this decade".

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