ANTONIO GUTTERAS

SECRETARY GENERAL OF THE UNITED NATIONS ANTONIO GUTTERAS

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JAPAN VISIT 2020 - U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday he will visit Hiroshima in August for the 75th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of the city. The visit will be “a way to demonstrate, not only my solidarity with Hiroshima, but my strong commitment to nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation,” Guterres said at a news conference at the U.N. headquarters in New York.

In 2010, then-U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon attended the Aug. 6 peace memorial ceremony in Hiroshima, becoming the first U.N. chief to do so. In 2018, Guterres became the first U.N. chief to attend the memorial event in the city of Nagasaki, where an atomic bombing took place three days after the attack on Hiroshima.

When he met with Hidehiko Yuzaki, governor of Hiroshima Prefecture, in New York last April, Guterres indicated his wish to visit Hiroshima in 2020. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were devastated by the U.S. atomic bombings in August 1945 in the closing days of World War II.

MIDDLE EAST JANUARY 2020 - UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned "a wind of madness is sweeping the globe", pointing to escalating conflicts from Libya and Yemen to Syria and beyond. At a wide-ranging news conference on Tuesday, he said: "All situations are different but there is a feeling of growing instability and hair-trigger tensions, which makes everything far more unpredictable and uncontrollable, with a heightened risk of miscalculation." 

The UN chief also expressed great frustration that legally binding UN Security Council resolutions "are being disrespected before the ink is even dry."

Guterres singled out Libya where he called the current offensives by the warring parties "a scandal" - coming soon after world powers and other key countries adopted a road map to peace in Berlin on January 19 that called for respect for a UN arms embargo, an end to foreign interference in the fighting by rival governments and steps toward a cease-fire. Libya has been in turmoil since 2011, when a civil war toppled longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who was later killed.

A weak UN-recognized administration that holds the capital Tripoli and parts of the country's west is backed by Turkey and to a lesser degree Qatar and Italy. On the other side is General Khalifa Hifter, whose forces launched a surprise offensive to capture the capital last April from their base in the country's east and are backed by the United Arab Emirates and Egypt as well as France and Russia.

Guterres said the 55-point Berlin agreement has been repeatedly violated by fighting and continuing arms deliveries.
"We are seeing more and more civilians being targeted... migrants in a desperate situation and all the commitments that were made apparently were made without a true intention of respecting them," he said. 

The secretary-general also expressed "enormous concern" at the escalation of attacks in Idlib, Syria's last rebel-held province with a population of three million, and said the UN is "particularly worried" that the escalation now includes the Syrian and Turkish armies bombing each other. He again urged a cessation of hostilities "before the escalation comes to a situation that then becomes totally out of control." 

As for Yemen, Guterres said he was very encouraged recently to see Iranian-backed Houthi Shiite rebels stop attacking Saudi Arabia and the Saudis, who back the country's internationally recognised government, limiting their military actions. But unfortunately, the last few days have seen "a new escalation," he said, adding, "We are doing everything we can for this escalation to be reversed, and everything we can to create the conditions for a true political dialogue to be re-established."

In Iraq, which has faced mass anti-government protests since October 1 in which at least 500 demonstrators have been killed, the secretary-general called for the human rights of protesters to be protected. The protesters have decried rampant government corruption, poor services and lack of employment and are demanding the overthrow of the political establishment, electoral reforms and snap elections. 

Guterres said militias have sometimes been "the worst perpetrators of violations of human rights" and attacks against protesters. It's critical for the government to ensure that the army and policy regain the monopoly on the use of force to ensure the normal functioning of the state, he said.

Antonio Gutteras is Secretary General of the United Nations, presumably then the person the IMO's, Kitack Lim, reports to. We are concerned at the failure of the IMO to look at ideas that come from outside their administration, where it might not suit the laborious climb to zero carbon shipping, that will never halt global warming, as in tackling the tipping point from where recovery is impossible.

With a closed-shop attitude like that we are presently investigation, what change do we have to stop desertification and acid oceans. Organizations like the IMO and UN, should welcome with open arms, suggestions as to solutions.

RED FLAG STRATEGY - In Britain in 1865, the locomotive and stagecoach companies lobbied politicians to introduce laws to prevent horseless carriages from competing with their businesses. One absurd requirement was that a man had to walk 60 yards ahead of a car carrying a red flag.

Left to their own devices, ship owners would quite happily carry on using dirty bunker fuels forever. They love the oily black substance because it allows them to make huge profits from cheaper transport. You would have thought that responsible operators, faced with global warming, would have been investing their ill gotten gains in clean tech, leading the charge to climate cooling and legitimacy.

But no, it is much easier to keep moaning about costs and confusion as to how to change, where the IMO have been attending meeting after meeting for years on end, achieving very little except a salary and expenses. The ship owners realized their tactics were working and kept playing the same tune, but for how long?

MORAL COMPASS - People don’t generally wake up one morning and decide, “I want to be enslaved by something difficult to manage and seemingly impossible to escape, because that sounds like fun.”

No, the road to depravity is a long one. It’s one traveled with many deliberate steps - steps that become easier and easier to take. Call it a moral compromise, an addiction, a weakness, or a sin - the destination in which they find themselves in poverty is one found by slowly compromising moral values while dancing with the devil.

The fact is that ship operators have been building bigger and bigger behemoths, to carry more and more containers, using heavy diesel oil as the fuel - all the while knowing that we were in a climate emergency. But also knowing that as they built their luxury cruise liners, they would use them to blackmail the IMO into extending the use of dirty fuels, using an economic argument that would not have existed if they have looked for alternatives in good time.

There’s a certain allure found in doing things we know that we shouldn’t do. We try to self-medicate as we binge on food; we seek stress relief with alcohol or cigarettes; we spiral downward in our addiction to drugs or pornography, always in search of the ever-elusive higher high; we allow frustration to morph into anger and eventually into bitterness and rage; we let one little exaggeration of the truth snowball into an unwieldy maze of lies; we become depressed and complacent as we stop engaging in life and pursuing healthy relationships or activities. We know full well the peril that comes with certain choices, yet once we dip our toes into that water, it becomes easier and easier to stay.

And that is how global warming has reached epidemic proportions. We are hooked on fossil fuels and promises of economic growth. All lies spun by corrupt politicians seeking election and businesses raking in the cash, when they should have known better.

And even though we can clearly see from the onset just how disastrous the destination will be, once we take certain actions, it becomes seemingly easier to pursue a little more and a little more and a little more… The downhill trip to despair is much more effortlessly travelled than the difficult climb back up to higher ground. It’s better to avoid a pushy door-to-door salesman by refusing to open the door in the first place than it is trying to get him to leave once you’ve invited him in.

Never open the door to a lesser evil. Unfortunately, we did that on several fronts at first not realising that the evil was evil: coal and oil; two drugs that are hard to kick. Coming off petrol and diesel engines is like going cold turkey, inhaling their carcinogens lead to cancer while the electorate is charmed by political porn stars like Putin and Trump.

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SEXY OR WHAT? - If these pictures turn you on, rehabilitation is going to be a long hard road. What amazes us is that anyone thought this kind of high was morally acceptable. We bit into the apple and ate to the core, without noticing how energy depraved we had become as we worshiped the $dollars that our snake charming political porn stars had promised as the path of righteousness. Salvation will be impossible with corruption in politics.

BLOCKERS TO ADVANCEMENT - Four of the G20, those with high incomes and expectations built on continuous growth and exploitation based on fossil fuels, could be behind the brake that smacks of the Locomotive Act of 1865. Can we expect that clean ships with zero carbon signatures will be forced to have a chap swim ahead of solar and wind powered vessels, carrying a red flag?

LINKS & REFERENCE

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/02/05/national/u-n-chief-antonio-guterres-visit-hiroshima-august/#.XjuYtm52tPY

https://www.dw.com/en/uns-antonio-guterres-warns-of-global-wind-of-madness/a-52258627

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/un-secretarygeneral-antonio-guterres-global-insecurity-a4353756.html

http://www.imo.org/

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