When the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres talks about climate change, he tends to highlight its, let’s say, apocalyptic characteristics. In 2021: “We stand indeed at the edge of the abyss.” 2022: “We have a rendezvous with climate disaster.” 2023: “Humanity has opened the gates of hell.” So it is something of a departure to hear him speak about a climate-related issue with unbridled enthusiasm.
“We are on the cusp of a new era. Fossil fuels are running out of road. The sun is rising on a clean energy age,” he said in a speech in New York on Tuesday. “The clean energy future is no longer a promise. It’s a fact. No government. No industry. No special interest can stop it.”
Written by the Climate Action Team inside Guterres’s office, the report found that solar and wind are now “almost always” the cheapest and fastest option for new power generation. They are the fastest growing electricity sources in human history, and their growth now outpaces fossil fuels; 92.5 percent of all new electric capacity installed in 2024 came from renewables. Global clean energy investments exceeded $2 trillion in 2024, and the sector accounted for 10 percent of GDP growth around the world.
Of course, the fossil fuel lobby of some fossil fuel companies will try” to slow this obvious momentum, Guterres said. “But I have never been more confident that they will fail – because we have passed the point of no return.”
The report makes clear that there are still challenges to the energy future, but it is framed as a grand possibility rather than a lurching churn through the mud. “We have an unprecedented moment of opportunity to invest in the policies, frameworks, and infrastructure needed to capitalize on the falling costs, manufacturing capacity, and abundant resource endowment of renewable energy to unlock the transition globally — particularly in developing countries where renewable resources are vast and energy access needs are greatest,” the authors wrote.
Meanwhile, Guterres may be sure that “no country” can stop the transition, but one in particular sure is trying. Trump has signed executive orders aimed at propping up the country’s “beautiful clean coal industry,” ordered individual coal plants to remain open past their planned retirement dates in the name of a fake emergency, and granted years of “regulatory relief” to other such plants that will let them ignore pollution rules. The GOP has effectively gutted the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate provisions, removing the subsidies that were powering an actual American manufacturing boom (Guterres pointed out that this is a global problem, with fossil fuels still enjoying a nine-to-one advantage in terms of some subsidies), and taken aim at the exact renewables-backed transmission projects that would do the sort of grid strengthening they always crow is necessary.
This is a country running in fear from the future of energy, at the whims of a few rich fossil fuel enthusiasts and a party whose only additional motivating force is to do whatever Democrats don’t like.
“The fossil fuel age is flailing and failing. We are in the dawn of a new energy era. An era where cheap, clean, abundant energy powers a world rich in economic opportunity. Where nations have the security of energy autonomy,” Guterres said on Tuesday. “Countries that cling to fossil fuels are not protecting their economies – they are sabotaging them.”
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