UNGA: British PM Boris Johnson says the world needs to 'grow up' and deal with climate change

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(CNN) Humanity needs to "grow up" and deal with the issue of climate change, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday.

Johnson, a last-minute addition to the speakers' list that day , slammed the world's inadequate response to the climate crisis and urged humanity to "listen to the warnings of the scientists," pointing to the Covid-19 pandemic as "an example of gloomy scientists being proved right."

"We still cling with parts of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure," he said. "And we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality."

"We believe that someone else will clear up the mess, because that is what someone else has always done," he added. "We trash our habitats, again and again, with the inductive reasoning that we've gotten away with it so far, and therefore, we'll get away with it again.

"My friends, the adolescence of humanity is coming to an end and must come to an end."

Clarkey7163 on September 23rd, 2021 at 14:19 UTC »

If climate change can stop being a political issue in the eyes of the masses and be responded to as the humanitarian crisis it is, that’s good

I will applaud and give credit to any and all politicians who are taking steps to address this stuff.

3rdOrderEffects on September 23rd, 2021 at 11:56 UTC »

The full speech if anyone is interested - https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-at-the-un-general-assembly-22-september-2021

Video - https://youtu.be/wmsj9055Fnc

An inspection of the fossil record over the last 178 million years – since mammals first appeared – reveals that the average mammalian species exists for about a million years before it evolves into something else or vanishes into extinction.

Of our allotted lifespan of a million, humanity has been around for about 200,000.

In other words, we are still collectively a youngster.

If you imagine that million years as the lifespan of an individual human being – about eighty years – then we are now sweet 16.

We have come to that fateful age when we know roughly how to drive and we know how to unlock the drinks cabinet and to engage in all sorts of activity that is not only potentially embarrassing but also terminal.

In the words of the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord “we are just old enough to get ourselves into serious trouble”.

We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.

We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.

We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.

My friends the adolescence of humanity is coming to an end.

We are approaching that critical turning point – in less than two months – when we must show that we are capable of learning, and maturing, and finally taking responsibility for the destruction we are inflicting, not just upon our planet but ourselves.

....

Two days ago, in New York we had a session in which we heard from the leaders of the nations most threatened by climate change: the Marshall Islands, the Maldives, Bangladesh and many others.

And they spoke of the hurricanes and the flooding and the fires caused by the extreme meteorological conditions the world is already seeing.

And the tragedy is that because of our past inaction, there are further rises in temperature that are already baked in – baked is the word.

And if we keep on the current track then the temperatures will go up by 2.7 degrees or more by the end of the century.

And never mind what that will do to the ice floes: we will see desertification, drought, crop failure, and mass movements of humanity on a scale not seen before, not because of some unforeseen natural event or disaster, but because of us, because of what we are doing now.

....

But if we are to stave off these hikes in temperature we must go further and faster – we need all countries to step up and commit to very substantial reductions by 2030 – and I passionately believe that we can do it by making commitments in four areas – coal, cars, cash and trees.

I am not one of those environmentalists who takes a moral pleasure in excoriating humanity for its excess.

I don’t see the green movement as a pretext for a wholesale assault on capitalism.

Far from it.

The whole experience of the Covid pandemic is that the way to fix the problem is through science and innovation, the breakthroughs and the investment that are made possible by capitalism and by free markets, and it is through our Promethean faith in new green technology that we are cutting emissions in the UK.

When I was a kid we produced almost 80 per cent of our electricity from coal; that is now down to two per cent or less and will be gone altogether by 2024.

We have put in great forests of beautiful wind turbines on the drowned prairies of Doggerland beneath the North Sea.

In fact we produce so much offshore wind that I am thinking of changing my name to Boreas Johnson in honour of the North Wind.

...

We have the technology: we have the choice before us.

Sophocles is often quoted as saying that there are many terrifying things in the world, but none is more terrifying than man, and it is certainly true that we are uniquely capable of our own destruction, and the destruction of everything around us.

But what Sophocles actually said was that man is deinos and that means not just scary but awesome - and he was right.

We are awesome in our power to change things and awesome in our power to save ourselves, and in the next 40 days we must choose what kind of awesome we are going to be.

I hope that COP26 will be a 16th birthday for humanity in which we choose to grow up, to recognise the scale of the challenge we face, to do what posterity demands we must, and I invite you in November to celebrate what I hope will be a coming of age and to blow out the candles of a world on fire.