DAVOS: The United Nations secretary general had some choice words for ‘big oil’ on Wednesday, as he skewered petroleum companies for having “peddled the big lie” about their role in global warming, telling the World Economic Forum that they should be held accountable.

Addressing a room full of the world’s business and political elite, Antonio Guterres drew a parallel between the actions of oil companies and those of tobacco companies that have been hit by huge lawsuits over the adverse effects of cigarettes.

“We learned last week that certain fossil fuel producers were fully aware in the 1970s that their core product was baking our planet,” Mr Guterres said.

He was referring to a study published in the journal Science that said ExxonMobil had dismissed the findings of its own scientists on the role of fossil fuels in climate change.

UN chief urges WEF to hold ‘big oil’ accountable; climate change minister calls for standardising best practices in climate regulatory frameworks

“Just like the tobacco industry, they rode roughshod over their own science,” Guterres said, referring to lawsuits that determined cigarette companies had hidden the dangers of their products.

“Some in Big Oil peddled the big lie. And like the tobacco industry, those responsible must be held to account,” he said.

In 1998, US states won a landmark settlement against tobacco companies worth $246 billion aimed at recovering the costs of treating smokers from the harmful effects of cigarettes.

The study on ExxonMobil found that the firm’s scientists had modelled and predicted global warming “with shocking accuracy”, only for the company “to spend the next couple of decades denying that very climate science”.

ExxonMobil is the target of a number of lawsuits in the United States.

Asked about the Science report, an ExxonMobil spokesman said last week that the issue had come up several times in recent years and in each case the company’s answer was that “those who talk about how ‘Exxon Knew’ are wrong in their conclusions”.

‘Experience the burn’

Separately, during a discussion on ‘Bending the Emissions Curve’, Pakistan’s Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman said that Pakistan “experiences the burn much faster and harder than anybody else, and in a kind of scale that nobody has seen”, and called on historic emitters responsible for the majority of global greenhouse emissions to mobilise resources to allow developing and emerging economies to make the energy transition to renewables without compromising on development.

According to a statement issued by her ministry, Ms Rehman highlighted that the pledges and commitments towards clean energy transition were quickly abandoned when there was a threat to the world’s addiction to excess energy. “A global reset is needed because the addiction to energy and consumption is taking away the futures of those that live in the arc of vulnerability, and also of those living in the developed world. It will be too late to change our addictions and habits to energy consumption as we are speeding towards a planet that’s burning up, with investment in renewable energy not where it needs to be to save the planet,” she said.

She urged the world not to work on the climate change issue in isolation, saying that “working in silos was counterproductive”.

“At the moment, there is no standardisation of the best practices for regulatory frameworks that could be shared across the board through global governance frameworks and multilateralism. For instance, if such a framework was made available for carbon pricing mechanism, it will then become a regulatory practice that the governments will feel bound to work with.”

She was of the opinion that moral imperatives were not enough, and there was a need for a system with clear incentives and penalties.

Published in Dawn, January 19th, 2023