Giving Compass' Take:

• The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told politicians and business people at a gathering in Austria that subsidies for fossil fuels should end because they are destroying the planet. 

• What is the role of donors to help divest from fossil fuels? 

• Read about why fossil fuels are harmful in other ways besides climate change. 

Subsidies that promote the use of fossil fuels are helping “to destroy the world”, and are a bad way to deploy taxpayers’ money, the head of the United Nations said on Tuesday.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told a gathering of politicians and business people in Austria that pollution should be taxed, and subsidies for oil, gas and coal should be ended. “Many people still think that to give fossil fuel subsidies is a way to improve living conditions of people,” he said in remarks delivered at a Vienna conference on climate change.

According to the International Energy Agency, global fossil-fuel consumption subsidies in 2017 were more than $300 billion, up from about $270 billion in 2016.

Guterres said he believed taxpayers would prefer to see their money returned to them rather than used to wreck the planet.

A hard-hitting report produced by hundreds of scientists this month warned that up to 1 million animal and plant species are at risk of extinction due to humankind’s relentless pursuit of economic growth.

It identified industrial farming and fishing as major drivers of the crisis, and said climate change caused by burning fossil fuels was exacerbating the losses.

Even if governments met the commitments they made under the 2015 Paris Agreement to tackle climate change, temperatures would still rise more than 3 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial times, “which means a catastrophic situation”, Guterres said.

He has convened a summit in New York on Sept. 23 aimed at spurring governments, businesses and others to step up their efforts to curb climate change.

“I am asking leaders not to come with beautiful speeches but to come with concrete plans to promote the climate action we need,” he said in Austria.

Read the full article about fossil fuels from Thomson Reuters Foundation at Eco-Business.