For immediate release

April 4, 2022

Press contact: Dallas Goldtooth, dallas@ienearth.org

Bemidji, MN –  Today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the third and final Assessment Report in this sixth attempt to address climate change mitigation. The report, focused on the mitigation of the climate crisis, is meant to give clear advice to global leaders on how to change the course of the climate emergency, while greatly influencing policy, investments and public discourse. 

However, the report fails to include an adequate roadmap to the phasing out of fossil fuels, a directive to confront the crisis that is reinforced by data. Instead, the report foregrounds large-scale false solutions, framed within reaching a “net-zero” target, that pose irreversible harm to Indigenous Peoples and Mother Earth, such as carbon dioxide removal (CDR), carbon pricing, solar radiation modification (SRM), and market-based mechanisms. 

The false solutions embedded in the disappointing report will continue to have horrendous impacts on Indigenous Peoples’ human rights, lives and territories. Last week, over 350 global organizations sent an open letter demanding that the IPCC and global leaders focus on rapidly ending fossil fuel production and end the focus on false technologies and market-based distractions. Such false promises merely prop up the fossil fuel, agrobusiness, pharmaceutical and tree plantation industries. 

The stakes could not be any higher, the science any clearer, or the imperative for immediate action any greater, we need to keep fossil fuels in the ground and rapidly decline their usage.

The following is a quote by Tom BK Goldtooth, Executive Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network:

“This latest report, though reinforcing the urgency for climate action, sadly also uplifts market-based scams as solutions, thereby promoting the ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples and our homelands. Projects such as carbon capture, solar radiation management and carbon pricing merely represent another money-making frontier for setters and colonizers. It is a horrific expansion of a deeply flawed, unjust and unethical system. We call on the IPCC and world leaders to listen to Indigenous Peoples and Mother Earth to focus their future western research projects on keeping fossil fuels in the ground and rapidly declining fossil fuel production overall.”

For more information: https://ienearth.org

http://realsolutions-not-netzero.org/

Read the open letter to Governments and the IPCC here: https://www.ienearth.org/340-organizations-call-on-governments-and-the-ipcc-to-foreground-rapid-phaseout-of-fossil-fuels/

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