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Oil company chief urges investment in fossil fuels, as world heats at a record pace

Talk about unfortunate timing. At the start of last week, the head of the
world’s largest oil company, Saudi Aramco, was applauded when he told the
CERAWeek energy conference in Houston it was time to “abandon the fantasy
of phasing out oil and gas”. Amin Nasser said the world needed instead to
invest in fossil fuels to meet demand at a time when the clean energy
transition was “visibly failing on most fronts”.

One day later, the head of the UN’s World Meteorological Organization, Celeste Saulo, received no applause for issuing a report that showed climate records had been not
just broken but smashed in 2023, the hottest year on record. More than 90
per cent of the world’s oceans suffered heatwave conditions, glaciers lost
the most ice on record and the extent of Antarctic sea ice fell to by far
the lowest levels ever measured.

To an extent not widely appreciated, the
world is now warming at a pace that scientists did not expect and,
alarmingly, do not fully understand. At a Financial Times conference this
month, Jim Skea, the chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, said last year’s spike in temperatures was “quicker than we all
anticipated”. “It was a surprise,” he said. “Ocean temperatures
were just off the scale in terms of historic records. It was completely
unusual and we still need to do more work to explain it.”

FT 24th March 2024

https://www.ft.com/content/6f858196-0a9c-4f0f-9720-a0a81849a998

March 26, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change