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Speech: COP President: Looking Back and Stepping Forward Wilson Center, Washington DC

Cabinet Office

October 14
16:25 2022

Good morning everyone. Its a pleasure to be here.

I want to start by thanking Ambassador Green, and Ambassador Quinville, for the warm welcome that Ive had here at the Wilson Center.

I want to reflect back to nearly a year ago when the world came together, and we forged together the historic Glasgow Climate Pact.

I have to say that what we agreed in that Pact went further than actually many people had imagined was possible.

Thanks to the commitments made, both inside and indeed outside the negotiating rooms, by both the public and private sector, we left Glasgow with what I described at the time as a fragile win.

The pulse of 1.5 degrees remained alive.

And we did this against the backdrop of an increasingly fractious geopolitics, and we had nearly 200 countries come together to join forces in the face of a shared global challenge.

Now almost a year on, it is just 23 days to COP27, the end of the UKs COP Presidency, and the end of my time as COP President.

And the transition to Egypts Presidency is coming at a profoundly challenging juncture in our current geopolitics.

Vladimir Putins brutal and illegal war in Ukraine has precipitated multiple global crises: from energy and food insecurity, to inflationary and debt pressures around the world.

These crises are absolutely compounding existing climate vulnerabilities, and of course, then the scarring effects of a once-in-a-century pandemic.

But as serious as these crises are, we must also recognise a seismic structural shift that is underway.

Our global political economy, built on fossil fuels for the last century, is in a state of flux.

Concurrently, leaders and their citizens around the world are dealing with spiralling climate impacts.

Climate catastrophes are becoming more frequent, and sadly they are becoming more ferocious.

In recent months, as you know, an area the size of the United Kingdom has flooded in Pakistan, with death, disease and the displacement of millions of people following in the waters wake.

The reality is that these events are becoming increasingly connected.

Extreme drought and heat, for example, amplify the drivers of migration, of supply chain fragility, and with significant disruption to major economic sectors, not least global grain production.

And so I have to say this to you that this is no longer something that happens to other people, somewhere far away.

Right here in the US, in recent weeks, Hurricane Ian has battered the East Coast.

There are serious concerns about defending the Eastern seaboard, and the genuine possibility that entire cities will have to relocate away from the coast in our lifetimes.

Earlier this summer, the Colorado River, which generates power for tens of millions of Americans and is a lifeblood for agriculture, was placed in an unprecedented state of emergency, due to falling water levels.

So the future that scientists and climate activists have long warned us about, and which has frankly been a reality for some of the most climate vulnerable countries for decades, is now a reality for many millions. It is a reality for us in this room.

And as the science continues to tell us unfortunately: the worst is yet to come.

Catastrophe for many millions more lives and livelihoods.

Costs soaring into the trillions.

And entire sectors becoming stretched, and uninsurable.

There was a report from the Australian Climate Council Study that came out this June that concluded that 1 in 25 Australian homes will become effectively uninsurable by 2030. 1 in 25.

So friends, we are in a new world.

And navigating this context is our defining challenge.

And frankly, it is a challenge that we will rise to, or fall short of, in this decisive decade.

And so today, from the vantage point of the ending of my time as COP President, I want to take stock of where we are.

And I want to start by recognising, and indeed championing, the fact that, in some quarters, outstanding work is being done to cement the gains of the Glasgow Climate Pact, and to take us further.

We are now part of an irreversible direction of travel.

Yes, there is still oil, gas and coal in use and production around the world.

But around half a decade ago, we passed a tipping point, when annual newly installed power from renewables surpassed that from coal, across the OECD.

And estimates suggest that by the middle of this decade, renewable capacity is expected to be up 60 percent on 2020 levels.

And leaders are across the world increasingly turning to renewables to guarantee cheaper, cleaner, and more secure power for their populations.

We have the Inflation Reduction Act here in the US. Countries like Australia are back on the frontline of the fight against climate change.

India has published a strengthened emissions reduction target, its 2030 Nationally Determined Contribution.

And as you heard I was just in Kenya, whose remarkable geothermal potential is truly a vision of a cleaner future.

Now people in my country talk about nuclear or fossil as baseload, but geothermal is doing that job in countries like Kenya.

The plant I visited, Olkaria, was already producing 1 gigawatt of power. Kenya has the potential for ten times more geothermal power.

And indeed if you look along that rift, there are many other countries that have potential as well.

Now businesses are also stepping up. They are reimagining ways of working on sustainability, rather than plastics, pollution and waste.

Just last week you will have seen that the worlds biggest reinsurer and underwriter to nearly a quarter of the global economy, Munich Re, turned its back on oil and gas.

And civil society, represented in this room as well, is embracing the power of the collective, to make clear that it simply will not accept anything less than a net zero future.

Now, in all of this work, we are realising the growth story of this century.

A growth story that can deliver millions of green jobs in this decade, and economic development benefits.

A story in which collective action and rapidly increasing scale deliver vast benefits in terms of cost and innovation.

I mean just look at the extraordinary fall in the cost of renewables from which we are already benefiting.

Solar costs down 80 percent since 2010.

Wind power costs down by up to three-quarters since their peak just over ten years ago.

And all whilst we have experienced the largest ever annual increase in the price of wholesale gas.

And have a look at the sort of innovations that could see parked cars feeding energy back into the grid, or the electric cable cars I used to move around on my visit to Mexico City earlier this year.

And it is a future of hope, in which our cities become more liveable, and more breathable, our energy becomes cheaper, and cleaner, and our ecosystems become more robust.

But, despite all of this, I do find myself reflecting on three years in this role, and all the speeches and all the interventions I have given in literally every corner of the globe.

And I am reflecting on conversations I have had here in Washington over the past few days, and they bear remarkable similarity to conversations I was having three years ago, as a fresh-faced COP President-Designate.

And Ive been reflecting on the G20 Climate and Environment Ministerial meetings in Indonesia, which I attended earlier this summer, where some of the worlds major emitters threatened to backslide on commitments they had made previously, in Glasgow, and indeed in Paris.

And this all whilst the extreme weather events that I spoke about earlier, continue to batter and devastate countries and continents across the world.

And indeed, these extreme climate events are impacting communities in the very G20 countries which were pulling back on ambition in that Climate Ministers meeting.

So I have to say this very frankly to you friends, that there does remain a big deficit in political will.

In that can-do spirit which is so badly needed.

And I am left wondering what further evidence, and what further motivation, global leaders could possibly need to act.

It is unfathomable to me that we are not doing everything in our power to respond to the inevitable structural changes that we are facing, and to prevent climate catastrophe.

And we should be under no illusions.

We are not yet doing everything in our power.

So we have to ask ourselves: why are we not going further? Why are we not going faster?

Competing priorities, and the need to do more than one thing at once

Now, I do understand that leaders around the world have faced competing priorities this year.

But you know, we cannot tackle any of the crises we face in isolation.

And we cannot allow cyclical crises, as painful as they are, to distract us from the net zero transition.

Or, as my friend Mark Carney has put it, we must not fall victim to the tragedy of the horizon.

Now that unfortunately happened amidst the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, just a year after hundreds of IPCC contributors were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And frankly many decided climate action could wait for the future.

And so we lost critical momentum as a result.

We must find the ability to focus on more than one thing at once.

And I am reminded, when I was the UKs Business and Energy Secretary.

My team and I worked to support businesses through the darkest and most challenging moments of the pandemic

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