The global transition towards cleaner energy is advancing despite the reluctance of political leaders to commit to phasing out fossil fuels, with falling renewable energy costs increasingly determining the pace of change. As governments gather for the COP31 climate summit in Turkey, conflicting policies among some of the countries leading the negotiations have exposed the gap between their climate commitments and energy decisions. Yet the expansion of solar, wind and battery technology is beginning to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, with market economics emerging as a more powerful driver of change than international political agreements.
The United Kingdom, one of the countries advocating stronger climate action, has approved the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea under the government led by Prime Minister Andy Burnham, despite his declaration at COP31 that Britain wanted to demonstrate leadership on climate action. The project could generate up to 36 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions without noticeably reducing energy prices. The government is also considering approval for the Rosebank oilfield and a weakening of its electric vehicle mandate. The decisions illustrate the difficulties governments face in reconciling climate commitments with continued support for conventional energy production.
Similar contradictions are evident among the summit’s joint hosts, Turkey and Australia, both of which have promoted a clean energy transition. Turkey recently announced two new oilfields intended to help increase production by 30 per cent, while also promising to double natural gas production. Australia, meanwhile, has approved several fossil fuel projects, including an extension to a coal mine in the Hunter Valley. The mine has been described as a climate bomb because of its projected environmental consequences, with estimates suggesting its emissions could contribute to the loss of an additional 15 million Great Barrier Reef coral colonies during every bleaching event. The United States, the world’s second-largest emitter, is again boycotting the annual climate summit.
The political difficulties come as international efforts to contain global warming have lost momentum. According to Climate Action Tracker, collective climate action has effectively stalled, with existing government policies placing the world on course for a temperature increase of 2.7°C by 2100. Although the commitments made under the 2015 Paris Agreement helped reduce the projected warming trajectory by more than 1°C, current policies remain insufficient to prevent a substantially higher rise in global temperatures.
There is, however, evidence that the growth of renewable energy is beginning to affect global emissions. The Global Carbon Budget expects fossil fuel emissions to decline slightly in 2026, marking a rare occurrence previously seen only during the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2008 financial crisis and the break-up of the Soviet Union. The projected reduction of 0.4 per cent has been partly attributed to the oil crisis associated with the Iran war, which disrupted oil consumption. However, the expansion of inexpensive solar and wind power and electric vehicles has offset more emissions than the increase in oil prices alone would explain.
The Global Carbon Budget report suggests that, if the expansion of clean technologies continues, a sustained peak followed by a decline in global carbon dioxide emissions could be only a few years away. The finding points to an energy transition increasingly shaped by the commercial competitiveness of renewable technologies rather than the pace of diplomatic negotiations.
Auke Hoekstra of Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands argues that technological and economic advantages, rather than government policy, are now the principal forces behind the expansion of clean energy. “Policy was never the main driver,” he says. “These technologies are simply superior.”
Hoekstra has drawn attention to the repeated failure of International Energy Agency projections to anticipate the speed of solar panel production growth. Solar power now generates ten times more energy than it did when the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, making it the fastest-growing electricity source in history, followed closely by wind power.
The economics are increasingly difficult for conventional energy sources to compete with. Electricity generated from solar and wind is now cheaper on average than electricity produced from natural gas or coal. The shift is also evident in places where political support for climate policies is limited. Texas, the leading oil-producing state in the United States and a stronghold of support for Donald Trump, has also become the country’s largest producer of both solar and wind power.
In lower-income countries such as Nigeria and Pakistan, consumers are increasingly bypassing expensive and unreliable fossil fuel-based electricity systems by installing inexpensive Chinese solar panels on their rooftops. This development allows households and businesses to adopt renewable energy without waiting for governments to modernise national electricity grids, effectively moving towards cleaner energy through a different route from the conventional hydrocarbon-based development model.
One of the principal limitations of solar and wind power has been their inability to generate sufficient electricity during evening peak-demand periods. However, falling battery prices are helping to address this problem. According to the International Energy Agency’s Global Energy Review 2026, utility-scale and household battery storage capacity is expanding even faster than renewable electricity generation, improving the ability to store energy and make it available when production falls.
Government intervention nevertheless remains important in determining how quickly the transition progresses. Early subsidies and regulatory measures introduced by countries such as China and Germany helped create the market conditions that enabled renewable technologies to become progressively cheaper. Although commercial competitiveness is now driving expansion, policy decisions can accelerate or obstruct that process. The cancellation of electric vehicle subsidies by the Trump administration is one example of how government decisions can slow the adoption of cleaner technologies.
At the same time, governments continue to provide more than $900 billion in annual support for fossil fuels, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Such assistance sustains conventional energy production even as renewable technologies become increasingly competitive.
A proposal being discussed at COP31 to increase the share of energy consumption supplied through electricity to 35 per cent by 2035 could provide further momentum for the transition. Achieving the target would require substantial expansion of electricity grids, currently one of the principal constraints on wider electrification. Governments could help overcome this limitation by reducing administrative barriers and providing subsidies and loans to support grid development.
Kingsmill Bond of the energy think tank Ember believes the economic advantages of clean technologies could allow the world to limit warming considerably below the 2.7°C projected under current policies. The extent of that reduction, however, will depend on political decisions. Bond has proposed that countries dependent on energy imports establish their own climate summit, excluding fossil fuel-exporting countries that could delay negotiations over the transition.
“The old system is just being propped up by legacy policy and ignorance,” he says. “We’ve just got to tear that down.”
