The evolution in the language of climate diplomacy took its latest step at the United Nations General Assembly this week as world and diplomatic leaders framed the push for green energy as a matter of national security amid energy price shocks driven by global wars. With COP31 fast approaching, the pitch reframes renewables as a source of energy autonomy rather than a tool to save the planet, sidestepping the deadlocked fights over fossil fuel phase-outs that sank the last two climate summits.

“We have seen how fossil fuel dependence wreaks havoc, driving up costs, draining budgets, squeezing households and leaving countries at the mercy of conflicts and decisions far beyond their borders,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres told the High-Level Meeting on Climate Action and the Just Transition, convened at the 81st General Assembly in New York.

“Fossil fuel expansion continues, defying science, economics and common sense,” Guterres said, calling on every country to draw up “a credible roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels with clear timelines.” So far only Germany, France and the Netherlands have published such national roadmaps. “Emissions are still rising when they must plummet.”

The meeting marks the last climate summit Guterres will convene before his term ends in December. Climate action has been a defining cause of his decade-long tenure, during which he has accused the fossil fuel industry of treating the atmosphere like “an open sewer”, declared “the era of global boiling has arrived,” and told world leaders at COP27 in 2022 that “we are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”

Yet at the Assembly, the argument dominating floor time was not that of the existential importance of climate change Guterres has spent a decade making, but one countries can sell to skeptics, finance ministers and treasuries: that clean energy is cheaper, and immune to the fossil fuel price shocks that have hit the global economy three times since 2020, from the pandemic to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

“Neither the sun nor the wind can be blocked by any army,” Spain’s ecological transition minister Sara Aagesen told the summit, citing Madrid’s doubling of renewable capacity in eight years and now generating 56% of its power from clean sources. “Spain is better prepared to face the wars that we are seeing both in Ukraine and Iran now.”

Straits, hoaxes and ‘annihilation’

The meeting came amid a week of political turmoil likely to extend uncertainty in the Middle East and the seven-month closure of the Strait of Hormuz, sharpening the case for renewables made at the climate summit.

US President Donald Trump, addressing the General Assembly on Tuesday, weighed whether to make a deal with Iran or to “annihilate the Islamic Republic.” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, addressing the Assembly the following day, condemned the US and Israeli strikes on Iran as “a grave betrayal of diplomacy.”

Across the Arabian Peninsula, Houthi advances in Yemen are threatening the Bab al-Mandeb strait, the other key waterway used to transport oil and gas, opening a new front in the trade route war and further threatening global energy supplies.

In the same speech, the US President dismissed climate change as fictional alongside “the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, the Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine hoax,” and claimed it had been rebranded from global warming “because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.”

Yet as Trump waged a war of words on green energy policy at the General Assembly lectern, the war on the ground in Iran has both cut fossil fuel demand projections and catalysed the push for energy independence through renewables, which his administration so forcefully opposes.

“Despite all the federal efforts to prop up fossil fuels, the US got more energy from solar power than from coal, for the first time ever,” Michael Bloomberg, the Secretary-General’s special envoy on climate, told the summit.

The IEA now projects that global oil demand will decline 2.5% in 2026, the first annual drop since the pandemic, as the disruption drives countries toward renewables, electric vehicles and nuclear power. Analysis suggests much of that demand destruction may be permanent, as countries lock in infrastructure that will shape energy use for decades.

UNEP declared earlier this month that the 1.5°C warming target is no longer achievable. Under current policies, the world is heading for 2.6°C by the end of the century. A record-breaking super El Niño is expected to peak in December, with 2026 forecast to be the hottest year ever recorded.

“UN-convened cooperation and national efforts have reduced the projected global temperature rise from well over 4 degrees Celsius to 2.6 degrees Celsius,” UN climate chief Simon Stiell said. “Undeniable progress, but not enough to avoid catastrophe.”

Synergies aligned for green energy

The Hormuz crisis is the third fossil fuel price shock in less than a decade, following COVID-19’s collapse of the global economy in 2020 and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Each has exposed the vulnerability of economies dependent on imported oil and gas, and each has accelerated investment in domestic renewable capacity that is not subject to the same geopolitical disruption.

“Some seven months ago, the most important energy artery of the world, the Strait of Hormuz, is closed,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol told the summit. “Oil, LNG, fertiliser flows have stopped.” He said “a big chunk, if not all” of governments’ responses to the crisis were “based on clean energy choices.”

The security argument has been building since April, when 57 countries gathered at the first conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia, two months after the start of the Iran war. The framing crystallises the threats of depending on unpredictable actors in Washington, Moscow and Riyadh in favour of sources nations can control.

“For many, many years in the energy world, we had three choices in front of us,” Birol said. “Shall I choose the most secure energy option? Shall I choose the most economic energy option, or shall I choose the cleanest energy option? We had to make choices, we had to make trade-offs. But when we look at the world today, for the first time in years, all of these three objectives are getting aligned.”

UN Deadlock and Iran War Oil Shocks Push 54 Nations to Chart Fossil Fuel Phase Out

According to IEA figures, around 80% of solar and wind generation worldwide now comes in cheaper than coal or gas. Battery prices have fallen 75% in a decade. This year, the agency expects $2.2 trillion to flow to clean energy, compared with $1.2 trillion for oil, gas and coal. Stiell said renewables had already helped the world avoid “almost half a trillion US dollars in fossil fuel costs.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen traced the EU’s painful education in energy autonomy, from Russia’s 2022 cutoff of gas that supplied 45% of Europe’s needs to the current Gulf crisis that, like the Ukraine war before it, was started beyond Europe’s borders and beyond its control.

“We thought we were out of the woods. No way,” she said. “Then came the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.” Since then, imported fossil fuels have cost the EU an extra €90 billion, accelerating what she called a “massive” pivot to renewables and nuclear.

“This clean electricity gives us independence, energy security, and it is affordable,” von der Leyen said.

“I know the world’s eyes are on the Gulf, and Fiji prays for peace there,” Fiji’s President Ratu Naiqama Lalabalavu said. “But consider the arithmetic. The closing of one strait is costing the world economy some $2 trillion a year, and a ceasefire can end it. More than 3 billion people live in places highly vulnerable to climate change.”

“No ceasefire will end that. The carbon we burn today stays in the sky for centuries. The atmosphere does not negotiate.”

Money, economics and “ridiculous” fund

The security case is inherently a national one: countries invest in their own energy independence. For developing countries and small island states that produce a fraction of global emissions but face the worst of the damage, the argument for self-reliance offers little. They need international climate finance for adaptation and recovery, and it is not arriving.

“Africa has 60% of the world’s best solar resources, yet it receives only around 2% of the global clean energy investment,” said Mohamed Adow, director of the Nairobi-based think tank Power Shift Africa. “That is an extraordinary mismatch between opportunity and investment.” He called the cost of capital facing developing countries “a scandal of injustice.”

“Africa is not asking the world to come and rescue it. We are asking the world to stop putting obstacles in the way,” Adow said.

The obstacles are structural. Climate-vulnerable countries pay on average 1.2 percentage points more than others to borrow, meaning the finance that does exist is more expensive for those who need it most. The result is that four of every five dollars invested in clean energy have gone to advanced economies and China, according to the IEA.

At an adaptation finance dialogue on Tuesday, the Marshall Islands’ environment minister said his country spends “almost as much effort applying for funding and reporting back to donors as we are implementing.”

“If the $120 billion [in agreed adaptation finance] is not delivered, the shortfall should go directly to the loss and damage fund with interest,” its delegation added. “Of course, that is intentionally provocative.”

As climate financing falls short, five major Western oil companies have pocketed “nearly half a trillion dollars in profits” since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine against just $34 billion in international adaptation finance for developing countries, Guterres said in his major address on Tuesday. Their profits exceed the roughly $385 billion in total climate finance that developed countries provided and mobilised for poorer nations across 2022, 2023 and 2024 combined, according to the OECD.

While oil majors post record returns, the fund created to help countries recover from climate disasters sits virtually empty. Governments have pledged $822 million to the Loss and Damage Fund since it was created in 2022. Only about a third has arrived, while the fund has not disbursed a single dollar despite requests from at least 119 countries. The fund is one of many international climate finance instruments with coffers falling billions shrot of their targets.

“Let’s be honest,” Guterres said. “The amounts available in the Loss and Damage Fund are completely ridiculous.”

Road to COP31

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, hosting COP31 in Antalya from 9 to 20 November, billed it as an “implementation COP,” a label every presidency since COP27 in 2022 has claimed with mixed results. The agenda is deliberately fossil-fuel free, built to avoid the political torpedoes that sank the last two COPs, mirroring the messaging strategy on display at the General Assembly: winning ground on electrification, waste and construction without triggering the veto of oil-producing states that have blocked fossil fuel exit language since Dubai.

“Any proposal that fails to reconcile our climate objectives with social and economic realities will be doomed to fail,” Erdoğan said. “As inequalities in access to finance and to technology persist, it is not realistic to expect all countries to move forward all at the same pace.”

Murat Kurum, the Turkish minister presiding over COP31, adopted the day’s dominant frame. “Energy independence of the countries are now national security issues,” he said. “If countries were able to produce their energy in their borders, then this crisis wouldn’t be this effective today.”

The presidency’s agenda is built around six targets, led by raising electricity’s share of global energy from 23% to 35% by 2035, dubbed “35 by 35.” The others include halving the growth in global waste, cutting building energy intensity by 25%, and increasing circular material use to 15%, all by 2035. “If this target is agreed in Antalya, it will give a very strong and unmistakable signal to the investors, financiers, utilities, governments and beyond,” Birol said.

“Getting almost 200 countries to agree on every word is incredibly hard but incredibly important,” Stiell told the Assembly. “No single COP can fix this global crisis, but each takes meaningful steps forward.”