NEW YORK, November 13, 2026 – Wander around the expansive conference centers lining Turkey’s Mediterranean coastline this week, and one thing that won’t be present in the typical climate conference narrative is the apocalyptic doom-and-gloom talks. The United Nations COP31 climate conference negotiators are promoting spreadsheets, energy security, and utility bills.
Nor will there be an official White House pavilion this year. With the United States officially absent from the federal negotiations after the country withdrew from the Paris Agreement in January and before its official withdrawal from the underlying UN climate convention in February, former U.S. climate envoy John Kerry decided to take the microphone anyway. Addressing the climate conference on the sidelines of the event, Kerry said that the U.S. would eventually come back to the fight against climate change.
Why does a change in sales pitch matter right now in Antalya? Since progress on the diplomatic front is being hampered by geopolitical turmoil, inflation fatigue among voters, and fiscal constraints within governments, it falls to the summit organizers to persuade finance ministers that investment in clean energy is what will safeguard their economies against energy crises.
The leaders gathered for this year’s summit, which is being co-hosted by Turkey and Australia, have deliberately framed the issue of decarbonization as a necessity of economics and national security rather than as a moral imperative. As Europe’s Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen put it so succinctly: “Because even if you don’t believe in climate change, which I obviously do, we should be able to agree that moving away from a dependency on fossils is extremely smart for security reasons,” he told the summit.
Nonetheless, many representatives of developing countries burdened with debt feel skeptical—and who can really blame them when adaptation funds come laden with high-interest costs? The representative of the Least Developed Countries block, Ambassador Adão Soares Barbosa from Timor-Leste, stressed that funding for climate action should come as grants, not as loans. Debt repayment on climate loans almost tripled between 2020 and 2024 and may exceed new loans by 2036 if the trend persists—as “a second round of suffering,” according to Ambassador Barbosa.
But the recent developments in the Middle East have thrown another curveball at calculations of global greenhouse gas emissions. The war with Iran and resulting disruptions in crude oil production, increased energy prices and decreased energy consumption in the Middle East have caused an unexpected decline in global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report.
It’s, however, a complex picture. According to the forecasts of the Global Carbon Budget, the global emissions from fossil fuel consumption will decline by 0.4% this year to 38.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, with the reduction in oil emissions accounting for 1.9%. Nevertheless, specialists stress that it’s only a temporary decrease and not the peak point, and including the emissions related to land use changes will actually increase global emissions from 42.8 billion to 43.3 billion tonnes.
Ironically enough, the long-time climate change watchers in Antalya know about this well. No one cheers the fact of emissions reduction that occurred due to wars and economic crisis, but the supply shock provides strong support to the proponents of renewable energy sources because oil-dependent states are always vulnerable to political crises, while solar panels are not blockaded.
The man who made his journey to Antalya along with his fellow Democratic Party representatives and state governors without being identified by an official government emblem understood that well enough. Clean energy, Kerry asserted at the conference, was “not just about climate change. It’s about national security. It’s about economics. It’s about giving countries far more control over their own futures,” because “no country can block the sun from shining” and “no one can block any wind from blowing”. It’s yet to be seen if the foreign diplomats’ skeptical attitude towards his claim of a coming American renaissance holds true in light of the current climate policies in the country, which have flipped back and forth twice within one decade’s time frame.
The negotiations inside the negotiating halls continue to be marred by heated discussions surrounding language on the phase-out of fossil fuels, climate financing accountability, and sovereign debt. However, the overall atmosphere at the Turkish Riviera is becoming less idealistic and more pragmatic compared to previous years due to the use of economic arguments concerning energy security and competitiveness instead of moral appeals.
