World leaders at Climate Week link fossil fuels to wars and economic risk

Record El Niño and summer extremes shadow largest Climate Week

World leaders gathered in New York on Monday for the opening of Climate Week, using early speeches to frame the transition away from fossil fuels as a national-security and economic imperative rather than a primarily environmental one.

This year’s Climate Week, which runs alongside the U.N. General Assembly, comes after months of extreme heat across Europe and the United States, wildfires in Africa, flash flooding in Asia, and what organizers described as a record-breaking El Niño. Organizers said the event would be the largest yet, with more than 100,000 attendees drawn from politics, business and activism.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese delivered the opening keynote on Monday. “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 Australia’s efforts to support Pacific nations facing the climate crisis.

Iceland’s Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir gave the closing remarks. She traced her country’s near-total shift to renewable heating to the global oil crisis of the early 1970s, when most Icelandic homes burned 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,” Frostadóttir said. “So we made a choice. Instead of riding out the volatility, we turned to what was right under our feet.”

Within years, Reykjavík built a large-scale geothermal district heating system. Other towns followed, with many switching within a decade. Frostadóttir attributed the shift to “unwavering political support,” financial mechanisms that helped ordinary households make the switch “without ruinous upfront costs,” and a cross-party consensus that outlasted several governments. Now, nearly every Icelandic home is heated with renewable energy, more than 90 percent of it geothermal.

Frostadóttir urged leaders to act before crisis forces their hand. “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,” she said. “Our answer, from a small island in the North Atlantic is this: start before you must. Build the resilience before the crisis tests it.”

The security framing was prominent throughout the day. Selwin Hart, assistant secretary-general for climate action at the U.N., said the U.S. war in Iran had sharpened that message. “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 militaries must prepare to operate in changing environments. “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,” Nugee said. He said militaries should pay attention to climate-adaptation technologies not only for their lower emissions but for their 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.”

U.K. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband cited the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the U.S. war in Iran as evidence of what he called 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.”

Karen Pflug, chief sustainability officer at Ingka Group, the largest IKEA retailer, said energy efficiency in IKEA stores has saved the company millions of dollars every year. Pflug said the company had just announced a new solar park in South Carolina with 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.”

Little of the opening day focused on the U.S. government’s recent efforts to block climate action, including the Trump administration’s move to pay nearly $4 billion in taxpayer dollars to stop offshore wind projects and measures to weaken emissions standards for vehicles and coal-fired power plants. Speakers instead concentrated on the security and economic reasons they said made the transition impossible to ignore.

Helen Clarkson, chief executive of the Climate Group, which organizes Climate Week, said there had been a noticeable increase in what she called “climate hushing” — business leaders and politicians shying away from talking about the climate crisis amid a relentless focus on wars, inflation, and economic strife. “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,” Clarkson said. “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.”