Stop burning fossil fuels

The most basic response we have to extreme weather is to stop burning fossil fuels as fast as possible.

Friederike Otto

Physicist and Climate Researcher

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Friederike Otto

Physicist and Climate Researcher

10 Jul 2025

Key Points

If we want to reach the goals that are set out in the Paris agreement to limit global warming to 1.5°C or 2°C, we need to stop burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
Currently, it’s not a crime to sell or to burn fossil fuels and, although legislation is changing, making it a prosecutable offence is a difficult political process.
As a society, we need to adapt to changing extremes, and a great amount of this adaptation would reduce vulnerability anyway, independent of whether the weather is changing or not. But that still begs the question of who is going to pay for it.
Having early warning systems, more urban green spaces, better insulated houses and making free water available throughout the city are a few solutions making communities less vulnerable.
The most important thing that we need to do in dealing with climate change is talking about it. It is the young generations who are bearing the highest cost of climate change, and it is they who have changed the way in which we talk about the issue.

Stop burning fossil fuels as fast as possible

The most basic response we have to extreme weather is to stop burning fossil fuels as fast as possible. If we don’t do that, temperatures will continue to rise and it will become increasingly hard to adapt to the impacts of climate change that we are already seeing today. One way of addressing that, at least nominally, is through large international agreements like the Paris agreement. However, that alone is not enough. Climate change is affecting societies locally, depending on their vulnerability.

In addition to these global-scale international agreements, policies need to be implemented locally that will effectively make the goals of these agreements possible. As a society, we need to adapt to changing extremes, and a great amount of this adaptation would reduce vulnerability anyway, independent of whether the weather is changing or not.

Making societies more resilient

One big aspect of making societies more resilient is, of course, education and information. Having early warning systems for different kinds of extreme events, especially heatwaves, would be an appropriate solution. For example, in a big city in the Northern Hemisphere most people live and work indoors, and a heatwave will certainly affect people, mainly if the nighttime temperatures are high, as flats and offices will be unable to cool down. In parts of the world where people work outside, heatwave warning systems would be triggered much earlier, as the effects on human health would be much stronger. The warning systems need to be adapted to the vulnerability as well as the climate in the region, and currently our cities are not adjusted to the kind of temperatures we see in many parts of the world today.

Once the heatwave starts, in the short term, you could make metro stations and public buildings available for people to go in and cool down and make free water available throughout the city. In a heatwave, if everything is paved, the heat gets much more intense and the temperatures within the city become even higher. A medium-term solution to this, and a very important one, would be to create many more urban green spaces. In the longer term, houses need to be better insulated to be able to cope with high temperatures that have not been reached before.

Restructuring our cities and our institutions

While the Paris agreement to limit global warming to 1.5°C or 2°C is set in a global agreement, coal, oil and gas are burned locally. Our cities and our whole societal systems are designed based on the burning of fossil fuels, so we will need to restructure our cities and our institutions in order to achieve the net-zero goal – that is, having net-zero greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This can be achieved by demonstrating that you can design a city with a mobility and transport system that does not require individual cars but relies on public transport and cycling instead. If you can demonstrate that this kind of model works, it will be much easier for other cities to follow. That can have an enormous effect on a local scale as well as a much larger scale. Moving towards a net-zero or low-carbon world also means that a lot of companies that are currently digging up coal, oil and gas and burning fossil fuels will need to completely change their business model.

Climate litigation

Photo by Luciano Queiroz

In the last 30 years, these businesses have been petitioned to change their model, but not much has materialised. Currently, it’s not a crime to sell or to burn fossil fuels and, although legislation is changing, making it a prosecutable offence is a difficult political process, as evidenced in the past few decades. However, in recent years, a lot of climate litigation has started to take place. One example of this is happening at the moment in Germany, where Peruvian farmer Saul Luciano Lliuya is suing RWE, the German energy multinational company, for the fossil fuels they have burned. The greenhouse gases the company emitted led to a glacier in the Andes melting, so the lake that receives water from these glaciers is becoming much larger than it would have otherwise been, therefore threatening the city where Lliuya lives with outburst floods. Lliuya is asking RWE to pay part of the costs for the adaptation that is necessary to deal with floods from these glaciers. We have yet to find out if he’ll win the case, but it’s an example of how to use your cards.

Another example could be that of the Netherlands: the Dutch government has been brought to court because it did not put in the necessary legislation to achieve the goals they had signed up to in the Paris agreement. The government lost the case and now has to pass better legislation. This is a very good example of how local groups and local courts can be used to speed up the process of implementing legislation that is necessary for companies to change their business model, but also for the process of redesigning our society to be based on renewable energies instead of burning fossil fuels.

Who will pay the cost?

Some justify reluctance to adapting to or mitigating climate change by pointing out that it will be very costly. However, what we are clearly seeing today is that not adapting to climate change will be much more expensive than stopping climate change. But that still begs the question of who is going to pay for it.

Justice and equity are big aspects of climate change: at the moment, the most vulnerable are paying the price, whereas those who have profited most from the burning of fossil fuels are paying very little or nothing and still making profits from it. It has to be part of the solution of climate change that there is more equity in who bears the costs. One one way to do this would be, for example, the idea that is behind the Green Climate Fund: a big global fund where all the countries that have benefitted from the burning of fossil fuels over the last century contribute money that can then be used to adapt to climate change everywhere in the world.

The idea behind using litigation and a particular tort law where you would sue someone for individual damages would also be a way to shift the costs of adaptation from those most vulnerable. To my knowledge, there has not yet been a successful court case where a fossil fuel company has had to pay for the damages that they caused, but it is only a matter of time because we now have all the scientific and social tools available to demonstrate the chain of causality from individual emitters of greenhouse gases to global climate change. It’s a matter of time to see when such a case will be successful. The main advantage of having a successful court case where a company is sued to pay for damages to climate change is that then the liability risk of being sued becomes a threat to these companies and, therefore, a much larger incentive to change their business model.

Listening to the young generations

Photo by Jacob Lund

The most important thing that we need to do in dealing with climate change is talking about it and continuing to raise the importance of this issue. We have seen a lot of this happening in the last two years, starting with the school strikes that have been initiated by Greta Thunberg and that were continued across the world. It is very important to note that the people who are leading these strikes are almost all young women. In Germany, the most well-known and eloquent activist is Luisa Neubauer. In Uganda and other East African countries, it is young women who bring this topic to the streets, but they don’t stop at the streets. They all go to the big global summits. They fight very hard to make sure that nobody forgets the importance of climate change and how much climate change is a threat to the most vulnerable in society who, in many places of the world, are women.

It is the young generations who are bearing the highest cost of climate change, and it is they who have changed the way in which we talk about the issue. Talking about it, of course, doesn’t solve the problem, but if climate change is not brought high onto the priority list of every company, institution and government, we will not achieve what the global leaders have signed up to in the Paris agreement. This goal seems to only be realised by these young women who will continue pushing it on the agenda. It also shows that if we do not achieve more equity for these marginalised and more vulnerable groups in society, climate change will not be solved, and we are already seeing the kinds of problems it will bring.

Discover more about

Climate change and extreme weather effects on humans

Otto, F., Harrington, L., Schmitt, K., et al. (2020). Challenges to understanding extreme weather changes in lower income countries. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Coghlan, C., Muzammil, M., Ingram, J., et al. (2014). A sign of things to come?. Oxfam International.

Suarez, P., Otto, F., Kalra, N., et al. (2015). Loss and damage in a changing climate. Working Paper Series No. 8. Commissioned as an input paper for the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR).

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