A United Nations expert is calling for an urgent shift away from fossil fuels by the global economy, including a ban on advertisements or promotions, and the criminalization of misinformation from the industry. Elisa Morgera, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, who presented her 23-page report at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, reminded states of their human rights obligations, and businesses of their responsibility to phase out fossil fuel within the current decade. “The interlinked, intergenerational, severe and widespread human rights impacts of the fossil fuel life cycle, coupled with six decades of climate obstruction, compel urgent defossilization of our whole economies, for a just transition that is effective, human rights-based and transformative,” Morgera wrote in the report. She added there’s “no scientific doubt” that fossil fuels are the main cause of climate change, and the main driver of planetary crises including biodiversity loss and mass human rights violations. Morgera said at the Human Rights Council’s 59th session that current efforts to mitigate climate change “fall significantly short” of greenhouse gas reductions needed to limit global temperature rise to 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. But she added that “securing a liveable and sustainable future for humanity is still possible” through effective climate action within the decade. This includes countering the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to “keep the public uninformed about the severity of climate change and about the role of fossil fuels in causing it,” Morgera wrote in the…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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