World leaders address climate crisis before UN meet amid record-breaking El Niño
Prime ministers of Australia and Iceland discuss effects on their countries even as some shy away in face of war and inflation
World political leaders are descending on New York for the UN general assembly and some of them are putting the climate crisis on the agenda as they spoke on Monday at the start of the city’s annual Climate Week.
This year’s Climate Week – which runs alongside UNGA – comes after months of extreme heat in large parts of the world including Europe and the US, wildfires in Africa, flash flooding in Asia and a record-breaking El Niño.
The prime minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, gave the opening keynote address Monday while Iceland’s prime minister, Kristrún Frostadóttir, gave the closing remarks. Both spoke about the effects of the climate crisis on their countries, the measures they are taking to transition away from fossil fuels, and their support for other countries to do the same.
“Global weather has always been treacherous. But the science told us unmistakably that as the world warms these events will become more frequent and intense. And those scientific forecasts have come to be,” Albanese said, highlighting the country’s efforts to support other Pacific nations in fighting the climate crisis.
Frostadóttir said the Nordic country’s move to geothermal energy was catalysed by the global oil crisis. In the early-1970s, most Icelandic homes were burning imported oil for heat.
“Household budgets were hit and a small island nation, far from every market, every supplier, learned the hard way to depend on something you cannot control,” she said. “So we made a choice. Instead of riding out the volatility, we turned to what was right under our feet.”
In a matter of years, Reykjavík built a large-scale geothermal district heating system. Other towns in Iceland followed, many switching within a decade. “This took unwavering political support. Financial support mechanisms that helped ordinary households make the switch without ruinous upfront costs,” Frostadóttir said. “And, perhaps rarest of all in today’s world, across party consensus that outlasted several governments.”
Now, nearly every home in Iceland is heated with renewable energy, and more than 90% of it is geothermal.
Yet little was said on the opening day of Climate Week about the US government’s recent efforts to block climate action, such as the Trump administration’s move to pay nearly $4bn in taxpayer dollars to stop offshore wind projects and measures to weaken emissions standards for vehicles and coal-fired power plants. Instead of talking about political stalling and backsliding on climate action, speakers focused on the security and economic reasons that are making the need to transition impossible to ignore.
Selwin Hart, assistant secretary general for climate action at the UN, said the Iran war had further proven this point. “This crisis, as horrible as it is, is really serving as a wake-up call for countries, businesses and people really to break the fossil fuel addiction and accelerate the transition as fast and as quickly as possible,” he told the Guardian.
Lt Gen Richard Nugee, a retired senior British army officer, said that militaries need to be able to operate in the environment in which they find themselves, and those environments are changing. “A really good example of that is the sea in the gulf is getting so hot and is predicted to get so hot that the water won’t cool the engines of our ships,” he said. Nugee said that militaries should be paying attention to climate adaption technologies, not only for their lower emissions but their potential for strategic advantages.
“I don’t believe there is renewable energy that will drive a 70-ton tank. It’s not that,” he said. “But our small armed vehicles, why not make them hybrid? Which is better for our stealth, better for the crews because there’s less noise and less vibration.”
The UK’s foreign minister Ed Miliband also spoke about the risks of continued reliance on fossil fuels given the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the US’s war in Iran, describing the inherent instability as the “fossil fuel roller coaster”.
“Climate and nature must be embedded in national security systems, in threat assessments, and contingency planning,” Miliband said. “Countries need to pool information because a shock beginning in one country can rapidly travel through supply chains, financial markets and migration patterns to other countries.”
Meanwhile, the private sector is using the transition to renewable energy to protect its bottom line. Karen Pflug, the chief sustainability officer at Ingka Group, the largest Ikea retailer, said that energy efficiency in their stores has allowed the company to save millions of dollars every year.
Pflug said the company just announced a new solar park in South Carolina, which will have 178,000 solar panels. “So regardless of what’s happening from a political point of view I think it’s in fact making good business sense,” she said. “The economic imperative is there.”
Leaders also stressed the need to transition sooner than later. Iceland’s Frostadóttir said: “The only real question left for leaders, for all of us in this room, is what it takes to keep moving forward faster than the disruptions that have yet to hit us. Our answer, from a small island in the North Atlantic is this: start before you must. Build the resilience before the crisis tests it.”
Climate Week has been held annually in New York since 2009 and organizers said this year’s iteration will be the largest yet, with more than 100,000 attendees drawn from politics, business and activism. But they also admitted an uptick in “climate hushing” whereby business leaders and politicians have shied away from talking about the climate crisis amid a relentless focus on wars, inflation and economic strife that has swept the world.
“There has been this disconnect this summer where we have felt climate change like no other year with some massive disasters and the degree to which leaders want to speak about this issue,” said Helen Clarkson, chief executive of the Climate Group, organizer of Climate Week.
“Undoubtedly people care about the cost of living but we see in the polling people care about the climate too, they aren’t oblivious to what is going on. A word we heard a lot today in speeches is that we need courage to make that connection to people and join the dots.”
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