Tag: Ideas

The world has spent decades debating how to transition away from fossil fuels. Three years ago, at COP28 in Dubai, 195 countries reached, by consensus, an unprecedented agreement to do so. Since then, we have seen both the cost of waiting and the opportunity to act.

From Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warnings to the recent confirmation by the United Nations Environment Programme that the world is set to overshoot limits needed to prevent some of the worst of global warming’s harms, change is imperative. Extreme weather events are becoming more lethal, frequent, and intense. 

It is crystal clear to us that fossil fuel dependence is a liability, threatening energy security and economic development across the planet.

Yet the past year has also brought significant progress, showing how the transition away from fossil fuels is becoming a reality. After leaders gathered in New York for Climate Week and the UN General Assembly, there are several lessons we must carry into COP31—and reasons to accelerate action.

An emphasis on implementation 

At COP30’s closing plenary, we announced a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels by 2050. It examines the barriers societies face, the finance and policies they need, and the different pathways available to them, recognizing that countries start this transition from very different points.

Our agenda was also restructured to accelerate implementation of the Paris Agreement, uniting the world around solutions. A new two-tier multilateralism is already in motion. One speed is anchored in countries and consensus. The second, which does not require consensus, focuses on implementing the decisions of the COPs.

In that spirit, COP30 stimulated coalitions under the Global Climate Action Agenda, such as the one that organized the Santa Marta Conference, convened by Colombia and the Netherlands. The subsequent report set out options for national planning, investment, and international cooperation.

These efforts are building the foundations for our future beyond oil, gas, and coal. The test now is whether they help countries turn commitments into action.

An early answer came last month when Germany became the third country, after France and the Netherlands, to publish a national roadmap for transitioning away from fossil fuels. At the UN General Assembly in New York, Environment Minister Carsten Schneider presented the roadmap to phase out oil, coal and gas by 2045, framing fossil fuel dependence as a costly vulnerability.

Our fossil fuel dependence laid bare

When the war against Iran disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the consequences reached far beyond the region. Brent crude prices rose above $100 a barrel, putting pressure on fuel costs worldwide, squeezing government and household budgets alike. Since the start of the crisis, inflated prices for oil and gas have cost an extra $1.83 billion per day to importers with no additional benefit.

Spain and Brazil show that this vulnerability can be reduced. By late April, benchmark wholesale electricity prices had risen more than 20% in some European countries. In Spain, where renewables supplied nearly 60% of electricity, prices had fallen. Its investment in renewable power helped cushion the shock, showing how the choices countries make about their energy systems can protect them from fossil fuel volatility. In Brazil, the country with the largest proportion of renewables in the energy mix in the G20, the impact of prices has also been far less severe, as most drivers have the option to choose sustainable ethanol instead of gasoline at pumps nationwide. 

Our overreliance on fossil fuels has become unavoidable, undeniable, and unsustainable. 

Renewables are the world’s leading source of electricity

The clearest evidence yet that we have reached a positive tipping point for our power systems arrived in April, when the global energy think tank, Ember, released an annual review confirming that renewables overtook coal as the world’s leading source of electricity in 2025.

Renewable energy truly is the growth story of our time: powering economies, creating jobs, and strengthening competitiveness. Countries that build abundant, affordable renewable power, and the networks to deliver it, can attract the industries and investment of the electric age. And produce at scale the non-fossil fuels to decarbonize hard-to-abate sectors such as air and maritime transport.

According to the United Nations, every dollar invested in renewable energy creates up to three times as many jobs as a dollar invested in fossil fuels—making the transition an opportunity to build livelihoods as well as energy security.

The challenge ahead

In 2025, the world added more renewable electricity capacity than in any previous year, but deployment must accelerate. To meet this global imperative, we must double the amount of renewable power currently deployed on our grids in the next four years. 

We must also scale the electrification of energy, transport and industry to strengthen energy security, improve efficiency and boost competitiveness. Earlier this year, we launched the Electrify Now campaign to advance this effort. The incoming COP31 Presidency has also proposed increasing electricity’s share of global energy use to 35% by 2035. The challenge now is to turn this momentum into improvements people can see: electric buses on city streets, cleaner heat for homes and factories, reliable electricity for communities still without it, sustainable fuels replacing fossil ones in sectors where electrification is challenging.  

Delivering those benefits requires renewable energy as well as stronger grids, storage, and institutions able to coordinate their development. Without effective planning, projects can wait years for connections, and renewable resources fail to reach the people who need them. 

At COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, we shall strengthen credible plans, or commitments to develop them, for clean electrification within wider energy and economic strategies. Those plans must reflect national circumstances, be built in dialogue with society, and set out how national and subnational governments, together with business and many other actors, will expand infrastructure and stimulate investment. 

Business must match those commitments with capital, technology, and training. International financial institutions must help countries facing high borrowing costs secure affordable finance. Workers and communities affected by the transition need support to share in its benefits. 

What matters is what changes beyond the negotiating halls: more secure, affordable energy, better livelihoods, and less exposure to the next fossil fuel crisis. The task ahead is vast and calls for systemic change, but the direction is set, and the tools are at hand.

I keep losing my wireless headphones. When I do have them with me, they’re often out of battery. So one day earlier this summer, I decided to ditch them.

It felt like a huge step, as I’d long used in-ear tech as a shield from the auditory chaos of London. But what happened felt transformative. I was surprised at how present I was without them. 

During my first headphones-free commute, I smiled at strangers. I noticed the stops on the train line, something I never do when I rely on an app to tell me when to get off the train through my earphones. That one journey made me wonder if I had accidentally outsourced the joys of my city life to my phone. 

In 2026, we have become remarkably good at filling every quiet moment: Spotify on the train, podcasts while walking, Google Maps telling us where to go, our phones providing something to look at whenever there’s a lull.

The scale of this is striking. Ofcom’s latest research found that 93% of U.K. adults listen to some form of audio every week, and more than a quarter listen to podcasts weekly. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide listen to podcasts. 

There’s also a fascinating social angle. Research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that people often avoid talking to strangers because they underestimate how enjoyable those interactions will be. And research into constant smartphone connectivity published in Current Directions in Psychological Science suggests that our devices can cause us to miss the emotional benefits of casual interactions by effectively replacing them.

It turns out that there might be a psychological reason why being without headphones has felt so unthinkable. Psychotherapist Jack Worthy tells me that our earliest impulses as newborns are approach and avoidance. “We approach what feels interesting, exciting, or otherwise potentially rewarding. We avoid whatever feels dangerous, disgusting, or boring.” Our emotional life proceeds from these drives, and these drives evolved to promote our survival and success. 

Our headphones give us the power to dial in to highly appealing experiences and tune out everything we’d rather avoid in the environment. If our homes serve as refuge from the outside world, our headphones create a tidy micro-environment inside our heads. 

I decided to continue my experiment, spending a month commuting without earphones at all.

After a week without them, I started observing fascinating new details about streets that I had walked countless times. One seismic discovery was that the nearest train station to my flat is a two-minute walk away. Google Maps had shown me the longer route, hauling me around the local houses for more than double as long, which in London may as well be wasted hours.

Without headphones, I found myself overhearing bizarre conversations. Like the girl next to me on the train, who had found a Rhode lip gloss in her boyfriend’s car when she is a Rare Beauty girl. She assured her friend that it could not have been her lip gloss because she would never buy anything from Hailey Bieber—after all, she is a long-time Selena Gomez fan. “I can’t believe how Hailey Bieber stole Justin Bieber from Selena Gomez, and now someone else is stealing my man!” she wailed with her head held between her knees and her friend rubbing her back.

Another time, I witnessed a man nearly lose his mind after a stranger accidentally smeared dirt onto his white shoes. The man exploded, yelling at this innocent stranger. It was a captivating fight, and I was absolutely glued. How could this man be fuming about a simple mistake? Imagine if I’d missed the spontaneous subterranean soap opera because I was listening to a podcast.

My absolute favorite eavesdropping moment was when two women in leather outfits and cowboy boots boarded the train and sat opposite me. The woman next to the window said her stressed boyfriend Keith had just bought the couple a flat, so she didn’t feel she could pressure him for an engagement ring. I was glued to their ridiculous conversation and, when they got off, sad that I couldn’t listen in anymore, as her requests were getting more and more ludicrous with every outburst. 

“I don’t see him proposing to that nutter!” said the old man next to me, and we shared that rarest of joyous things: a communal laugh. 

“Good luck to Keith! Lots going on, poor fella.”

I couldn’t believe I had been missing out on so much drama. Looking back, I realized how rarely I let myself be bored, instead always reaching for distraction.

Psychoanalysis uses the term “reverie” to define a particular kind of constructive, necessary daydreaming, points out Worthy. “In therapy, reveries refer to the daydreams, memories, and associations occurring to the analyst during a session.” A sensitive, attuned analyst interprets those reveries to understand what’s happening between themself and the patient. 

If you’ve ever experienced a sudden moment of inspiration in the shower or on a run, if the solution to a sticky problem revealed itself to you spontaneously, you know something of what it means to use reverie. You let your mind unfold in unintentional directions, and your unconscious mind showed you what your conscious mind was missing. 

If we’re always moving through the world with headphones in, listening to music or podcasts or books, we’re compromising our mind’s space for revery, says Worthy. There’s less room for the constructive daydreaming our mental processes use for creativity, problem-solving, and synthesizing. 

By the end of the month, I had no desire for headphones. When the train got too loud, I would put them on just to cancel the screeching sounds of the metal wheels. But when it got calmer, off they came, and I was ready for the next drama. Now I’m excited for spontaneous comedy to pepper my commute and give me unexpected pick-ups throughout my day. 

My friends complain about how people rarely approach each other in London. During my no-headphones experiment, there have been some headlines for me, too: I got asked out on the streets as well as on the tube. Not that it led to anything romantic, but it wouldn’t have happened if I had my headphones on.