UN Climate Week presses for faster fossil fuel transition as UK weighs North Sea drilling

UN Climate Week in New York has renewed calls for a faster shift away from fossil fuels after a year of extreme heat and record floods, but the politics around the transition remain unsettled.

World leaders gathered for the annual Climate Week alongside a climate session at the UN General Assembly. Speakers said the superheated and desiccated summer was a warning shot and a postcard from a shared future. The question was whether it would lead to collective action, with little evidence of consensus before the session.

Climate change has also slipped from recent international debates. Until recently, the issue was firmly established at the centre of the international agenda, but this year it disappeared from the G7 and G20 discussions. One speaker called for a return to the offensive against denialism, while the transcript also noted a US president who had previously described the issue as a hoax. Rachel Kyte, the UK special representative for climate, said the US is one of the biggest emitters and is rolling back its climate policy, but she argued that other countries remain in. She said 194 countries are still in and working hard.

Evidence of continued fossil fuel reliance was clear. The Iran war has shown how the global economy remains hostage to oil price spikes, and China has turned to coal to soften the blow. ExxonMobil revised up its forecast for coal use by 2050 to 15% of the global energy mix. Its outlook projected that CO2 emissions would fall from about 38 to 30 billion metric tons by 2050, but that was 3 billion tons higher than its forecast a year earlier. It also cut its forecast for carbon capture from 3.1 billion to 2 billion metric tons by 2050. Growing data centres are expected to contribute to a 65% increase in electricity demand. The trends imply an average rise in pre-industrial temperatures of 2.5 to 3C.

Kyte said this was a fixable problem, but the first General Assembly where countries knew they were overshooting their temperature target. She said the world had passed 1.5C and had to make societies resilient while managing down emissions. She pointed to complications including the Strait of Hormuz being closed, inflationary pressure, higher food and fuel prices, and a strong El Niño.

In the UK, the government says it remains committed to net zero by 2050, but has not decided whether to approve oil and gas extraction from the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields off Scotland. If the fields are licensed, supporters of the principle say the UK could require that carbon taken out of the ground is put back, rather than released into the atmosphere. Kyte said the decision would weigh energy security and keeping the energy system safe. She added that the UK's leadership is valued because it tells other countries to do as it does, not as it says, and that developing countries want help to upgrade grids, phase out coal and grow renewable energy. If the UK drills, senior climate figures have asked what signal that sends to resource-rich developing countries being urged not to extract every last drop.

Adaptation was another focus. The record El Niño is already fuelling typhoons in the Pacific, and climate scientists warned it could cause 450,000 excess deaths by February. El Niño is a natural cyclical phenomenon, but it shows the energy that rising temperatures can unleash.

Kyte also rejected the idea that the climate conversation has been entirely displaced by artificial intelligence. She said the two intersect because AI needs huge amounts of energy, but it can also improve efficiency and manage grids better.