IPCC Report Confirms the Need to Keep Fossil Fuels in the Ground to Achieve 1.5oC, 350.org Says

One month after hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets around the world to demand real climate action as part of the Rise for Climate Mobilization, the world's scientists have issued their clearest call for avoiding the worst impacts of a warming world. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN-backed body of scientists, just released its special report on Global Warming of 1.5 oC. The study confirms that limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5degC would be significantly better than breaching the 2degC threshold, supporting calls for a definitive stop to fossil fuel use and a rapid transition to energy systems based on 100% renewable energy.

Payal Parekh, 350.org program director, commented: "The science in the IPCC report on 1.5degC speaks for itself. Staying under 1.5oC is now a matter of political will. Burying our heads in the sand cannot be contemplated as an option any longer. The climate crisis is here and already impacting the most vulnerable and the least responsible for creating it. The only way to achieve it is to stop all fossil fuel extraction and redirect the massive resources currently spent on the fossil fuel economy towards the renewable energy transition".

The IPCC report is released after US media reported that the Trump Administration's own environmental impact statement noted the current track of planetary warming of seven degrees by the end of the century. The Administration offered no solution to the climate crisis nor plan to step up on addressing pollution, in fact, quite the opposite.

May Boeve, executive director of 350.org said, "It's clear what's at stake. In the United States, the Trump administration has made clear they are siding with fossil fuel executives over protecting our communities from the worsening climate crisis exacerbating by their own policies. The IPCC report is yet another wake up call for leaders to go further, faster by stopping new fossil fuel projects and ensuring a just transition to 100% renewable energy that supports workers and prioritizes racial and economic justice."

Communities worldwide are already resisting fossil fuel extraction and calling for a deep transformation of our energy systems and economies. Some of these stories of resistance can be found in the newly released People's Dossier on 1.5degC. The Dossier puts faces and voices onto the facts and data provided by the IPCC special report. It contains the stories of 13 communities fighting on the frontlines of climate change: from young Pacific Islanders trying to stop the Adani mega-mine to fishermen communities in Africa battling against new coal plants; from the struggle to stop a gigantic gas pipeline among the olive groves of Southern Italy to the landowners and Native Americans putting solar panels on the route of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Over the next days, 350.org activists will also launch a globally coordinated delivery of copies of the IPCC report, demanding that all institutions withdraw their support from the fossil fuel industry and stand up to them before it's too late.

The IPCC report explores in detail the impacts of a world 1.5degC warmer than pre-industrial levels and the feasibility of avoiding greater increases in temperature, while current national plans -if implemented - are only consistent with a world over 3degC warmer.

The key takeaways of the report include:

1. Keeping the world from warming over 1.5degC will prevent considerable disruption to all of the Earth's systems and allow for some ecosystems to partially recover from climate change after 2100, knowing that 20% to 30% of emitted CO2 will remain in the atmosphere for a time ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand years.

2. The 1.5degC target is feasible, provided enough economic resources are invested early enough to dramatically accelerate the phase-out of fossil fuels and the uptake of renewable energy and energy saving technologies across the board. Within the next decade or so, we will need to radically change the way we build our houses, move from one place to another and grow our food.

Delegates of national governments met in Incheon, Korea, over the course of last week, to negotiate line-by-line the so-called Summary for Policymakers (SPM), the executive summary of the report which is supposed to inform policies. Despite attempts to water down some critical language in the SPM by key countries such as the US, the underlying science in the roughly 1000-page long report doesn't allow any national government to downplay the magnitude of the document's findings and the need for a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels.