“London isn’t just calling. It’s cooking.” The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, opened with that line at London Climate Action Week on Tuesday, while the capital sat under a severe heatwave.
He built the speech around Dickens. “Crisis brings clarity and here in London, the city of Dickens, it is clear that our world is facing a ‘tale of two crises’,” Guterres said. One was a climate crisis pushing the planet toward catastrophic tipping points. The other was an energy crisis that, in his words, exposed “the folly of a world hooked on hydrocarbons.” The two looked separate, he said, but “they share the same destructive origin: fossil fuels.”
Temperatures in the UK were forecast to beat the June record set in 1976 by several degrees. Guterres warned that climate chaos is “accelerating before our eyes” and that the arrival of El Niño this summer risks “blowing the house down.”
The war and the energy shock
The Middle East conflict sat behind much of the address. Guterres said it has “unleashed the mother of all energy shocks,” one that doubles as a debt, food and development shock for poorer countries. A single conflict can upend global supply, he said, and a single chokepoint can send prices soaring.
“The lesson is clear: this model has no future.”
His answer was a “fast, fair transition to clean energy” paired with a surge in adaptation, resilience and climate justice for people already hit. He called renewables the cheapest, fastest and most scalable source of new electricity in most of the world, and laid out seven steps for countries to break from fossil fuels. Methane came first. Guterres launched a global “call to action on methane,” arguing that aggressive cuts could bring visible temperature relief within a generation, because the gas is 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide yet breaks down much faster.
A message to AI companies
Guterres also announced an AI environmental transparency initiative. AI can speed up climate solutions, he said, but it is “hungry for land, water and power,” and the data centres behind it already use more electricity than most countries.
“I am calling on every major AI company to measure and publicly disclose the full environmental impact of its systems, carbon, water, and land footprints, and to commit to powering every data centre with renewable energy by 2030,” he said.
Tipping points
Scientists now say average annual temperatures will pass the 1.5C limit that countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris Agreement. Guterres told the audience the task is to keep the overshoot small and short, and to bring temperatures back under 1.5C as fast as possible. A briefing from the UN Scientific Advisory Board, released the same day, set out what crossing those limits would mean: coral reefs pushed toward collapse, faster loss of ice sheets, the Amazon shifting toward savanna, and weaker ocean circulation.
“The Earth’s tipping points are like objects in a car mirror,” he said. “They are far closer than they appear.”
He also urged governments to tax the windfall profits that oil and gas companies made from the energy crisis, remove harmful subsidies, deliver climate finance to poorer countries and protect scientific independence.
