Every September the United Nations General Assembly’s high-level week coincides with what its promoters modestly call the world’s largest climate event – Climate Week NYC. The organisers insist the timing is no accident. With heads of state, ministers, bankers and the assembled apparatus of the climate-industrial complex already gathered for the General Assembly, running a parallel, thousand-event climate jamboree spares everyone a second transatlantic flight. This year the pattern held precisely to form.
The 81st UNGA’s General Debate ran from September 22nd to 26th; Secretary-General António Guterres convened his “High-Level Meeting on Climate Action and the Just Transition” in the middle of it, on September 23rd; and Climate Week NYC filled the gaps around it from September 20th to 27th. Research outfits such as Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy duly received star billing in the proceedings, as I noted last year when reviewing this event’s visible decline into irrelevance.
The two events are formally distinct – the General Assembly is the UN’s own sovereign-state machinery, while Climate Week is run by a private non-profit, the Climate Group, with no UN mandate at all – but the distinction is academic. The whole point of scheduling one alongside the other is that presidents, prime ministers, central bankers and NGO grandees are already in Manhattan for the diplomatic circuit, so a parallel programme of corporate pledges, academic research institutions and philanthropic panels can be organised at minimal extra travel cost. The result, year after year, is the same choreography: a sober-sounding UN track running alongside a carnival of announcements timed for maximum media pickup, with the same cast of characters drifting between the two rooms.
The Sermon from Turtle Bay
On September 23rd, Mr Guterres delivered his now-familiar green liturgy to the General Assembly: the world, he intoned, is crying out for “climate justice”; there is, naturally, “not a moment to lose”; and renewables, he assured delegates, are “the cheapest, fastest and most secure source of new electricity almost everywhere”, with clean energy having gone “from alternative to unstoppable”. As with every liturgy, doom is swiftly followed by salvation. He reassured the UN General Assembly that “fortunately, we have a way out”. It is the standard two-step of climate rhetoric: warn of Armageddon, then offer redemption.
The trouble is that the “cheapest electricity” claim collapses the moment it is measured honestly. The levelised-cost comparisons habitually cited strip out the cost of the backup capacity, transmission and storage that intermittent wind and solar require to keep a modern grid running. These are costs that, once included, erase the supposed savings of renewables. Nor did the Secretary-General pause to mention that electricity accounts for only around one-fifth of global final energy consumption. The other four-fifths – heating, transport, heavy industry – still runs overwhelmingly on hydrocarbons.
