Outgoing UN chief Antonio Guterres hailed the "unstoppable" rise of renewable energy and urged countries to develop firm plans to quit fossil fuels in his final climate meeting at the UN headquarters in New York. Guterres sounded a note of hope in his opening speech, highlighting that renewables are the cheapest, fastest, and most secure source of new electricity almost everywhere. He emphasized that clean energy has gone from alternative to unstoppable.
Guterres called on countries to lift their emissions cutting targets and release concrete plans to quit fossil fuels. Germany, Europe's biggest economy, issued its roadmap hours before Guterres' address, becoming the third country to do so, after France and the Netherlands. Guterres concluded that the world has the tools to end the fossil fuel age and avert climate catastrophe, but it is a challenge that requires immediate action.
The former Portuguese prime minister made climate change a defining issue of his nine-year tenure, which ends on December 31. Rachel Cleetus of the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists hailed Guterres as an "extraordinary climate champion" for consistently elevating the voices of the most vulnerable during his term. The stakes are clearer than ever, as the impacts of climate change surge around the world, from heat waves and wildfires in Europe to catastrophic flooding in Nepal and Tibet.
Guterres' remarks were followed by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Albanese touted the fact that during the height of the last Australian summer, half of the power for the grid came from renewables. However, his climate change and energy minister Chris Bowen is traveling to India and Saudi Arabia this week for talks on strengthening Australia's oil supplies.
Erdogan tempered expectations about the degree of ambition at COP31, stating that any proposal that fails to reconcile climate objectives with social and economic realities will be doomed to fail. Turkey has advanced a "35x35" target to increase electricity's share of global energy consumption to 35 percent by 2035, but it has not specified that the electricity should be generated by renewables.
Guterres asked leaders to accelerate the greening of their economies and mobilize climate financing for developing countries. Momentum is also gathering for electrification, switching combustion-based systems to electricity. Global renewable power capacity grew by a record amount last year, but clean energy is not growing fast enough to displace fossil fuels.
Pledges for Nepal, where thousands remain missing after a devastating August 26 flood, could also feature at the summit. Nepalese Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal recently stated that financial support "is not a matter of charity; it is a matter of legal and moral liability" for his climate-vulnerable country, which produces negligible emissions.
Key points
- Guterres urges countries to develop firm plans to quit fossil fuels.
- Germany, France, and the Netherlands have issued roadmaps to quit fossil fuels.
- The world is set to shoot past 1.5C of warming, bringing on worse climate-linked catastrophes.
