United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres held his end-of-year press conference at UN headquarters in New York on December 19th. “There may be plenty of reasons for despair,” he told reporters. Nevertheless, he said, “despite the limitations and long odds, we are working to push back against despair, to fight back against disillusion and to find real solutions.”
Secretary General Guterres called for yet another climate summit to be held next September, which he named the Climate Ambition Summit. This time must be different, he insisted. “It will be a no-nonsense summit,” the Secretary General declared. “No exceptions. No compromises. There will be no room for back-sliders, greenwashers, blame-shifters or repackaging of announcements of previous years.”
Yet another climate summit to be held next September
The Secretary General made his customary doomsday predictions if immediate action is not taken to eliminate reliance on fossil fuels and to stop adding greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere.
China, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, continues to game the UN Paris Agreement on climate change and has been putting more new coal plants into use than the rest of the world combined. As long as the Chinese regime makes a mockery of any serious efforts to address climate change to which it is substantially contributing, more UN summits and dire warnings from Secretary General Guterres will do nothing to move the needle forward.
Instead of convening more useless summits, demonizing the fossil fuel industry, and relying on scare tactics, it would have been better if the Secretary General had proposed more positive, concrete strategies to combat climate change. For example, the UN could be enlisted to set up, with sufficient funding, a Manhattan Project-style global science and technology government-private partnership, including with participation by fossil fuel companies serious about investing in green energy. This partnership’s number one priority should be to accelerate the work that has already been done to develop the technology producing a net energy gain in fusion reaction that has the potential for providing virtually unlimited zero-carbon power. Other priorities for the partnership could include the development of cost-effective technologies for such innovations as carbon capture, reflective sulfate aerosols, energy-from-waste facilities, and long-lasting, safer electric vehicle batteries.
The Secretary General lauded the agreement reached at the latest UN-sponsored global climate conference to establish a Loss & Damage mechanism to compensate developing countries for the havoc they experience from natural disasters allegedly caused by climate change. He still noted, however, that “the main problem for Africa and many other developing countries is the issue of injustice due to the sharp rise in inequality that we are witnessing.” He added that the corrections to such injustices should include more climate financing, debt reduction, and restoring “a sense of morality in international economic and financial relations.” This is UN shorthand for massive global wealth redistribution.
Black Sea Grain Initiative
Secretary General Guterres held out little hope in the near term for a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine conflict. “I am not optimistic about the possibility of effective peace talks at the immediate future,” he said in response to a question. “I do believe that the military confrontation will go on, and I think we'll have still to wait a moment in which serious negotiations for peace will be possible. I don't see them in the immediate horizon. And that is why we are concentrating our efforts on different other aspects in relation to increased efficiency of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, in relation to starting the possibility of adding new components to that initiative, namely, in relation to ammonia exports.”
The Secretary General praised “the enormous value of humanitarian action led by UN and UN agencies” in Ukraine but lamented the failure of the UN Security Council to deal with any dimension of the crisis. He did not explicitly point the finger at Russia, the aggressor that invaded Ukraine, for using its veto power to block the Security Council from taking any action.
Secretary General Guterres most likely held back from repeating his prior denunciations of Russia’s invasion to keep the diplomatic channels open to the Russian regime’s leadership where needed for humanitarian reasons and for maintaining the Black Sea Grain Initiative. He said that “without the UN, there probably would not be any other entity able to establish a dialogue with both parties and with other actors” to relieve the food crisis by allowing grain shipments from Ukraine’s ports. That is most likely an accurate assessment.
The Secretary General, to his credit, did not hold back from criticizing the Iranian regime directly for its brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters in that country. He said that “it is very clear that it is totally unacceptable the way in which Iran has reacted to the demonstrations, and we are witnessing massive violations of human rights that we strongly condemn...”
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Secretary General Guterres’ solution to the rise of hate speech and misinformation on social media platforms is regulation
On an entirely different topic, Secretary General Guterres was asked whether he thought that Elon Musk is “a threat to free speech.” He ducked responding to this loaded question specifically but said that whoever owns social media platforms should make sure that “hate speech, neo‑Nazism, white supremacism, the other forms of extremism, do not find their way through those social platforms.” He failed to acknowledge that social media platform owners also have a responsibility not to engage in biased content censorship as Twitter had done before Mr. Musk purchased the company.
Secretary General Guterres’ solution to the rise of hate speech and misinformation on social media platforms is regulation. I asked him what level of authority should issue such regulations. “There are things that require international legislation,” he replied, without specifying what things he had in mind. He cited the actions of the European Union as an example of positive developments, but then added, “It would be good if they could become more global.”
No, this would be a bad idea to those of us who believe that freedom of speech is the bedrock of a truly free society.
European lawmakers had no First Amendment to worry about when they passed the Digital Services Act, which takes effect in 2024. This European legislation places onerous, government-enforced obligations on social media companies to police their platforms for what European laws and regulations would define as hate speech and misinformation.
If that kind of government clampdown were attempted in the United States, it would be struck down as an unconstitutional infringement of the right to free speech. But Europe is insisting that its anti-free speech rules apply instead to U.S. social media companies if they want to serve European users. This will mean, as a practical business matter, that these companies will apply Europe’s standards to all of its content from wherever it originates for consistency’s sake. And Secretary General Guterres wants to use Europe’s approach as the model for global regulation of social media platforms.
I asked the Secretary General who decides what is misinformation, considering that notions originally thought to be anti‑science, in some cases, turned out to be correct, such as transmissibility of the coronavirus from fully vaccinated people. He replied that while scientific knowledge does progress from what was previously accepted as the consensus, the only way “to fight misinformation is to issue the right information and to actively engage in that.” But that begs the question as to who should be the arbiter of what is “the right information” at any particular point in time.
Governments and inter-governmental organizations should stay out of deciding what is “the right information” for the rest of us. The social media platforms are themselves marketplaces of ideas. information, and opinions on a grand scale among which users can decide for themselves what best serves their needs.
