‘Political and economic madness’ to invest in fossil fuels warns UN, as landmark climate report asks us to reduce demand

‘Political and economic madness’ to invest in fossil fuels warns UN, as landmark climate report asks us to reduce demand

It is "moral and economic madness" to fund new fossil fuel projects, the United Nations (UN) chief said today, as a pioneering report warned simply cutting emissions was no longer enough to curb the climate crisis.

The need to scale up the means to remove carbon dioxide from the air are now "unavoidable" in order to meet climate/net zero goals, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a landmark document.

The UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres called the climate report a "litany of broken climate promises... cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unliveable world".