On Monday, 9 November, the 31st United Nations climate conference opens in Antalya, on Turkiye’s Mediterranean coast. Nobody chose the moment it opens into. The war on Iran, led by the United States and fought alongside Israel, has badly disrupted oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Fuel prices have climbed around the world, and governments are hunting for other supplies, as AFP and Reuters reported in a dispatch carried by Al Jazeera.
So a summit about leaving fossil fuels behind begins in the year fossil fuels reminded everyone who is in charge.
A number for an answer
Turkiye has brought a number. It calls it the 35-by-35 Global Electrification Pledge: a non-binding commitment that electricity should meet at least 35 percent of global energy demand by 2035. According to the International Energy Agency, electricity now makes up about one-fifth of the world’s final energy consumption. Going from roughly 20 percent to 35 percent means raising electricity’s share by three-quarters in about nine years. That is a large ambition, and the pledge obliges no one to meet it.
The idea did not first appear in Antalya. COP31 President Murat Kurum unveiled it at UN headquarters in New York on 22 September, at the start of Climate Week, together with a separate Antalya Pledge on artificial intelligence, according to the COP31 presidency. The package comes with a global mechanism to track collective progress and with initiatives to electrify buildings, transport and industry over modern grids. Negotiators had already been weighing the target for weeks before the doors opened.
Kurum is also Turkiye’s environment minister. Speaking on Thursday, he described the year in plain terms: “This year’s energy crisis has shocked us.” Then came the sentence on which his presidency rests:
“everyone now understands that energy that you import is energy that you do not control”
“Electrification is the answer,” he said. “It protects communities from volatile global markets and cuts emissions.” COP31’s goal, in his words, is “to usher in the age of electricity.” Ankara argues that the pledge will speed the move to renewables while strengthening energy security.
Notice the order of the argument. Rulers have always found it easier to talk about sovereignty than about sacrifice, and Kurum’s case starts with control and only then reaches carbon. In a year of blockaded straits that may be shrewd politics. It does not settle what climate policy requires.
What the wire carries
That is the gap campaigners have found. The pledge does not require the extra electricity to come from low-carbon sources. A cable does not care whether a solar farm or a coal boiler feeds it. Critics are therefore asking whether electrification on its own can count as climate progress at all.
An analysis in The Conversation makes the same point and adds another: since the target says nothing about where the new power will come from, meeting it would depend on continued access to Chinese technologies, products and raw materials. Escaping one dependence, on this reading, could mean deepening another.
Islands and oil states
The old division is in the hall again. One group of countries, including South Pacific island states that rising seas threaten most directly, wants a clearer global plan for moving away from fossil fuels. Many oil and gas producers, Saudi Arabia among them, argue that fossil fuels can remain a large part of the energy mix if they are paired with technology to cut emissions or capture carbon.
The host has spread the rest of the agenda wide: zero waste, cutting methane, cities resilient to climate change, green industrialisation, education, and putting national climate plans into practice. A broad agenda gives every delegation something to sign. It also spreads attention thin.
The year of coal, and of cheap panels
Outside the conference centre, the year has pulled in two directions at once. In Washington, President Donald Trump has answered the war by promoting policies to push oil, gas and coal output as high as it will go. South Korea, India, Thailand and other Asian countries have burned more coal or moved to build more coal-fired power.
Yet renewable installations have grown too, driven by a surge in cheap clean-technology exports from China. Some analysts already credit falling prices more than treaties for the lower warming forecasts of recent years. This tension sits under the 35-by-35 pledge. The same crisis that makes electricity attractive also makes coal attractive, and the pledge, as written, would welcome either.
The talks run until 20 November. On the eve of the opening, an AFP photograph showed a woman walking past a COP31 sign near the Antalya Expo Center. The tankers stuck around Hormuz are the other half of that picture.