Guterres asks countries to quit fossil fuels on a timetable

Halfway through the United Nations General Assembly’s high-level week, the world’s leaders gathered for a climate summit in New York, and the Secretary-General used the occasion to put a specific demand on the table. Countries should draw up credible roadmaps, with clear timelines, for transitioning away from fossil fuels, Antonio Guterres said on 23 September. The framing was blunt: the present generation is the first with the tools to end the fossil fuel age, and the last that can still keep the worst of climate change at bay.

The request is a step beyond the usual summit language. For years the global climate talks have measured progress in national pledges to cut emissions by some distant target. A dated roadmap out of fossil fuels is a different kind of instrument, because it commits countries to the phasing-down of the supply itself rather than the vague moderation of demand. Guterres pointed at the G20, responsible for around 80 per cent of global emissions, as the group that has to move first. He called for renewable capacity to triple, energy efficiency to double, faster electrification, sharp cuts in methane and an end to deforestation, and he noted that the surging demand for electricity, including from data centres running artificial intelligence, has to be met with clean power rather than a new burst of coal.

The money came with its own numbers. Climate finance should reach 1.3 trillion dollars a year by 2035, he said, with at least 300 billion dollars a year mobilized for developing countries, and the burden falling first on the rich nations that industrialized early. The argument is that the energy transition needs a finance transition to match: debt relief when disasters strike, polluters paying, and a louder voice for the countries most exposed to a warming world.

The summit also produced three practical initiatives aimed at the places where action actually stalls. A Global Grids Accelerator, focused first on Africa and Southeast Asia, acknowledges that more than 2,500 gigawatts of renewable projects are already waiting for grid connections they cannot get. A task force on critical minerals, starting work in Guinea, Indonesia, Madagascar, Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe, tries to make sure the supply of copper, lithium, nickel and cobalt does not simply reproduce the old extractive relationship. And the existing Early Warnings for All effort, begun in 2022, reported that around 2 billion dollars has been mobilized to give every country warning coverage by the end of 2027.

The honest measure of a summit like this is never the speeches. It is whether the roadmaps actually appear on time, and whether the grids and the minerals and the finance get built. The language is now about leaving fossil fuels, which is a change from talking around them. Whether the timetable holds depends on governments that, as Guterres noted, are still approving new fossil fuel expansion against the evidence of their own scientists. The summit asked the question out loud. The answer will be delivered over the years ahead, in the grids that get strung and the plants that are not built.