UN Secretary-General António Guterres gives a speech at COP31

UN Secretary-General António Guterres said “the brutal truth is that the climate crisis is outrunning us” at the opening session of the COP31 Leaders’ Summit in Antalya, Türkiye on 11 November.

The Secretary-General stated that emissions in 2025 reached all-time highs; heat records keep shattering; and the last four years were the hottest ever. He noted that “ten years ago, solar generated one per cent of the world’s electricity.

Last year, solar power alone met nearly three-quarters of the growth in global electricity demand. A decade ago, one in every hundred cars sold was electric. This year, it is set to be nearly one in three.

Clean energy is now the cheapest source of new electricity across most of the world.” Guterres stressed, “fossil fuels must go the way of the dinosaurs, but that won’t happen on its own,” adding that “dinosaurs did not have a lobby, but fossil fuels do, and their strategy is simple: Distort the science, delay the policy, delay the action, delay the accountability.”