The annual World Economic Forum is underway in the Swiss ski resort of Davos, providing a snowy backdrop for leaders and CEOs to opine on international affairs, including close to 65 heads of state and government. On Wednesday afternoon, US President Donald Trump gave a speech, dialling down the rhetoric somewhat on his bid to acquire Greenland, saying he would not use force to take it.
Despite geopolitics grabbing the limelight, there are panels addressing issues including electric vehicles, energy security and climate policy. Keep up with top takeaways from those discussions and other climate news from Davos in our bulletin, which we’ll update throughout the day.
In energy transition’s “messy phase”, climate policy falters but clean tech marches on
Politicians may be struggling to free themselves from the clutches of fossil fuel interests, but that won’t slam the brakes on the march of clean tech and renewables worldwide, former US Vice-President and longtime climate advocate Al Gore said at Davos on Wednesday.
Moderating one of the first panels on day two in an almost empty room, he made a stab at answering the question posed by the World Economic Forum: “How do we avoid a climate recession?”
Gore said he sees “a climate policy recession, but not a recession in the energy transition”. That, he explained, is because policy is controlled by governments – “and too many governments are now, unfortunately, controlled by special interests”, namely the fossil fuel industry which is “significantly better at capturing politicians than at capturing emissions”.
The result has been “schizophrenic” policy on addressing climate change in some countries, including in the US, he said, with periods of slamming on the brakes and “going back to the dirty fossil fuels” to satisfy the industry.
In the real world, however, the advantages of renewable energy have become obvious, as have the consequences of the climate crisis, he added, listing a litany of recent impacts.
On the technology front, Gore pointed out that in 2025, of all new electricity generation installed worldwide, 93% was renewables, and “the only thing coming down faster in price than solar panels is utility-scale batteries, because the production is doubling every year”. “So we don’t have a recession in the movement toward this energy transition, in my opinion,” he added.
Jan 20, 2026 Politics
Climate at Davos: Energy security in the geopolitical driving seat
While climate change is a lower priority for leaders at this year’s World Economic Forum, control of energy supplies and minerals is a hot topicRead more
Jan 16, 2026 Politics
Roadmaps and Colombia conference aim to shift fossil fuel transition into higher gear
In 2026, global dialogues will chart a path to shift away from fossil fuels without harming workers or financial systems, experts told Climate HomeRead more
Jan 16, 2026 Clean Energy Frontier
At ‘Davos of mining’, Saudi Arabia shapes new narrative on minerals
Over 100 countries attended the Future Minerals Forum in Riyadh, putting the Kingdom at the heart of discussions on minerals for the energy transitionRead more
The Financial Times reported that Gore was among those who heckled and booed the US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick at a dinner in Davos on Tuesday night. Lutnick made dismissive comments about Europe and said the world should pursue coal not renewables.
During Wednesday’s panel, entrepreneur Zhang Lei, founder and CEO of Envision, which develops technology for clean energy systems and AI-powered energy digital platforms, said there may be some swings in climate policy but “the fundamental physics is actually improving”.
He pointed to an 80% drop in the price of energy storage in the last three years, which he said opens up a lot of opportunities to increase the penetration of wind and solar. That, he added, is exactly what is needed to meet the upsurge in electricity demand driven by the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), describing renewables as “infinite and inexpensive energy resources”.
Fossil fuels, by contrast, are “finite” and therefore not up to the job of powering an AI-based future, with electricity supply expected to increase by 10 times in the next 15 years. Renewables, however, are competitive and approaching “zero marginal cost”, he noted.
“We are so lucky to have renewable energy ready” to take advantage of “great prosperity” driven by AI, Zhang added, noting China’s pivotal role in providing the necessary clean tech to much of the world.
Investment by China is making the renewable energy transition “irreversible”, argued Elizabeth Thurbon, professor of international political economy and director of the Green Energy Statecraft Project at the University of New South Wales.
China will stay on this path, she added, because the government understands that the energy transition “is a massive national security multiplier” by boosting economic security, energy security, environmental security, social security through jobs and geo-strategic security.
Globally, however, she warned that the transition is “in a really messy, messy phase”, due largely to poor governance, especially across a lot of Western countries.
Carsten Schneider, Germany’s environment minister, argued that the European Union, for one, has not taken its foot off the climate policy pedal, agreeing a new emissions reduction goal of 90% by 2040 last December. But that was a hard-fought win, amid pressure from some coal-reliant Eastern European countries to soften the target.
EU’s new climate target lines up multibillion-dollar boost for carbon markets
On Tuesday afternoon, in a separate panel, Andrew Forrest, executive chairman and founder of Australian mining company Fortescue, advised politicians and business people not to waver in their commitment to the energy transition – from an economic perspective, if nothing else.
He spoke of his company’s plan to save up to a billion dollars per year in operating costs by removing over a billion litres of diesel from its supply chains by 2030, replacing the dirty fuel used by trucks, trains and ships with renewable energy and batteries. This will improve Fortescue’s efficiency and competitiveness, and cut pollution, Forrest added, enabling it to outperform its peers.
He appealed to fellow business and political leaders to follow economic sense, urging them not to turn away from renewables in 2026 “because the winds of politics blew your values over”.
Campaigners dispute Trump’s North Sea oil claims
During a lengthy headline speech on Wednesday afternoon, US President Donald Trump said that the UK has high energy prices because it is not producing enough oil and gas from the North Sea.
He said the region’s oil and gas fields are not depleted and have 500 years left, adding that the British government doesn’t let anyone drill and makes it “impossible for the oil companies to go” because “they take 92% of the revenues”.
In response, Friends of the Earth’s Mike Childs said UK energy bills are high because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent gas prices soaring. The UK’s electricity bills are based largely on on the price of gas. “Without the UK’s large-scale wind power, wholesale energy prices could have been up to a third higher in 2024,” Childs said.
On the details of Trump’s speech, Greenpeace UK campaigner Lily-Rose Ellis said taxes on oil and gas drillers “are a lot lower than he thinks”. According to the government’s North Sea Transition Authority, the current overall tax rate on profits (not income) from UK oil and gas extraction is 78% not 92%.
Uplift director Tessa Khan said Trump’s claim that there are 500 years of reserves in the North Sea is “nonsense”. She said the UK has burned most of its gas “and what’s left of the oil is increasingly difficult and expensive to extract”.
“Of course Donald Trump wants us to remain dependent on fossil fuels – and on US gas specifically – but that’s not in the UK’s national interest,” Khan added. “Renewable energy, which we’re lucky to have in abundance, is the only way to reduce our exposure to energy price shocks and mean we are not at the mercy of bad actors like [Russia’s President] Putin or the whims of Trump.”
Trump to pull US out of UN climate convention and climate science body
Senator Coons: US aid spending will mostly survive Trump cuts
US Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat, told another panel on Wednesday afternoon that US aid spending in the current fiscal year – which began in October 2025 – will be only a few billion dollars lower than in the previous year, despite President Donald Trump’s attempts to reduce it far more drastically.
The House of Representatives has proposed $50 billion of spending on development aid and international diplomacy in fiscal 2026, which Coons noted was “only a few billion different” from 2025. Coons said the Senate would pass this bill next week and Trump would sign it.
He said cuts to USAID’s budget at the start of the Trump presidency “created the mistaken impression that the United States has walked away”. But Coons insisted: “We are still engaged in development assistance.”
According to analysis of the House’s bill by the Center for Global Development, overall spending is 16% less than last year, while spending on global health programmes, humanitarian aid and multilateral development banks will not decline much. The bill also includes $150 million for the Global Environment Facility – which Trump had wanted to defund.
Big corporate polluters’ emissions rise in 2024
The NGO Influence Map has published its latest annual ranking of the greenhouse gas emissions of the world’s most polluting companies, using data from 2024.
The Carbon Majors database tracked 166 oil, gas, coal and cement producers and found that their total emissions increased 0.8% in 2024 compared with the previous year.
It shows that the trend has continued for state-owned fossil fuel companies – which account for 54% of emissions – to increase their emissions, while those of private corporations plateau.
Influence Map’s chart shows that the emissions of state-controlled entities (orange) are rising while investor-owned companies (blue) have stayed largely flat.
The top five state-owned emitters in 2024 were Saudi Aramco, Coal India, CHN Energy, National Iranian Oil Co., and Russia’s Gazprom.
The data update said emissions are increasingly concentrated among a smaller number of companies, with just 32 companies responsible for over half of global fossil CO₂ emissions in 2024, down from 38 five years earlier.
Influence Map noted that 17 of the top 20 emitting companies in 2024 were controlled by countries that opposed the COP30 climate summit launching work on a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels.
“Carbon majors are clinging on to outdated, polluting products and continue to mislead the public on the urgent real-world consequences of their actions. But they cannot hold us back for long,” said Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief and co-founder of Global Optimism.
She added that the Carbon Majors data provides a tool for “the growing majority who are coming together to champion science-backed solutions and accountability”.
The dataset has been used for lawsuits against polluting companies like Chevron, BP and RWE across Europe and in the US.
The post Climate at Davos: Clean tech powers on despite policy wobbles appeared first on Climate Home News.
From Climate Home News via this RSS feed