Yahoo Finance Climate change: We cannot reach our goals ‘if we continue to drill,’ says Sierra Club president
World leaders pledged to end deforestation by 2030 and curb methane gas emissions at the UN climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland this week.
Those promises do not go far enough, Sierra Club president Ramon Cruz told Yahoo Finance. “Are we where we should be to keep warming to 1.5 degrees? Definitely not,” he said.
The Sierra Club, one of the largest environmental groups in the U.S., has been fighting against climate change for years by, for instance, pushing for a ban on fracking, the process of drilling beneath the earth’s surface to extract gas or oil, because of its negative environmental effects.
Countries that signed the 2015 Paris Climate agreement pledged to pursue domestic measures such as greenhouse gas reductions to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees celsius.
However, unless those promises turn into action and result in strong global near-term emissions cuts, an August report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that global temperatures are on pace to increase at least 1.5 degrees by the early 2030s.
[Read more: Climate change: 1049 cities pledge to slash emissions in half by 2030]
“The scientific community have raised the alarm. We have raised the alarm for the last 30 years, three decades already and we should have been much more ahead of the game,” said Cruz. “Countries, especially developed countries, that created the problem that have the resources should step up their ambition.”
According to estimates by the Global Carbon Project, the biggest fossil fuel emitters in 2019 were the U.S., China, the European Union, and India. President Biden pledged in September to double aid to developing nations fighting climate change to $11.4 billion a year by 2024.
“We have seen that in the last decade that the market is turning the page on fossil fuels and so, definitely, we cannot be talking about reaching our goals in terms of climate change if we continue to drill, and so the methane [limit] is an important one,” said Cruz.
While Cruz says the G20 nations’ pledge on Sunday to cease the public financing of coal power plants abroad is a step in the right direction, he’d also like to see them focus on domestic coal burning.
The Sierra Club is supporting the Biden administration’s push to combat climate change through legislation such as his $1.75 trillion framework which would include $105 billion in investments and incentives to fight extreme weather and pollution.
“The president needs that to also have the moral authority to ask other countries to follow suit to be able to address the problem of climate change,” said Cruz. “The U.S. needs to lead again, but it needs to do it with substance, with setting an example.”
More from Sibile:
Workers’ pay stagnates as inflation concerns intensify: Bankrate
Here’s how companies can stop workers from quitting
Stitch Fix lays out ‘blueprint for future of retail’
Anita Hill: 3 ways corporate America can end sexual harassment
