Another year has passed, another ‘Conference of the Parties’ (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will convene. Next Monday the travelling circus pitches its tent again, this time in the Turkish Mediterranean resort of Antalya, for COP31, which runs from November 9th to the 20th. Some 100,000 participants are expected. Apart from the usual grand-sounding communiqués, more breast-beating by the climate NGOs and alarmist headlines by the legacy media, nothing much of practical significance will come out of COP31 in Turkey.

After a bruising contest between rival bidders, Turkey won the right to host while Australia’s Climate and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, was handed the gavel as “President of Negotiations”. One country hosts, another negotiates, and the Pacific islands, with Australia’s help, got a pre-COP of their own. The World Resources Institute’s David Waskow has summed up the defining context of the summit as “heat and Hormuz”, referring to this year’s blistering summer in Europe which supposedly proved that climate crisis is upon us, and to Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which cut off a significant share of the world’s oil and gas supplies and sent prices soaring.

The Hormuz effect

The climate Establishment has spent months arguing that both Europe’s hot summer and the Hormuz supply shock prove its case. Call it the Hormuz effect: first Ukraine, now Iran – every war in an oil- or gas-producing region exposes our dependence on what Ed Miliband, the UK’s previous energy secretary and now Foreign Minister, called “petrostates and dictators”. The only answer, claims Miliband and fellow climate ideologues in the EU, is “home-grown renewables” that no despot can switch off. UN climate chief Simon Stiell says fossil fuel dependency is “ripping away national security and sovereignty”. At the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin in April, ministers sensed an opportunity to recast wind and solar as guarantors of energy security, and Britain’s climate minister, Katie White, called the transition “even more imperative”.

It is a curious reading of events. A country at the mercy of imported hydrocarbons might conclude that it should produce more of its own, as Washington has done, rather than double down on intermittent power that needs gas-fired backup on every windless winter evening. Nor is swapping dependence on Gulf oil for dependence on Chinese panels and minerals an obvious gain in sovereignty.

The host’s revealed preference

The Government hosting COP31 is a case in point. Economists have a useful rule: judge people by what they do, not by what they say. Weeks before welcoming the world to Antalya, Turkey’s Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar stood beside Iraq’s Oil Minister and pitched the port of Ceyhan as a “global energy hub” and an alternative to Hormuz, with plans to expand Iraqi pipeline capacity and bring in Qatari gas. A Global Witness analysis of Rystad Energy data projects that the state oil company TPAO will nearly triple its gas production by 2035. Ankara is not abandoning oil and gas. It is positioning itself to collect transit fees on them.

Then there is coal. It still supplies nearly one-third of Turkey’s electricity, propped up by a guaranteed-price purchase scheme for coal plants that runs to 2030. In June, the Government announced a 1,050 MW expansion of the Cenal coal power plant. When a court struck down the planned expansion of the Afşin-Elbistan lignite plant, the environment ministry, headed by none other than COP31 President Murat Kurum, appealed the ruling. Across the world in Canberra, Bowen’s own Government recently approved an extension of the Saraji open-cut coal mine in Queensland.

The green lobby frames all this as a “credibility” problem for the COP31 hosts. It is nothing of the sort. It is revealed preference. Governments answerable to voters who pay electricity bills and fill petrol tanks will protect energy security first and recite climate pledges second. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said as much, warning that any proposal failing to reconcile climate objectives with social and economic realities is doomed to fail. That may well be the most honest sentence uttered by anyone associated with COP31.

Electrify everything – but with what?

With no agreement on fossil fuels in prospect, the Turkish Presidency’s centrepiece is a voluntary pledge, dubbed ‘35-by-35’, to raise electricity’s share of global energy demand from around 20% today to 35% by 2035. Campaigners were dismayed to find that the text does not ask governments to commit to producing the extra power from clean sources; it says only that the use of clean electricity will vary according to national circumstances. Activists warn that the pledge could allow governments to count expanded gas-fired generation as progress.

From their standpoint, they are right to worry. Around one-third of the world’s electricity is still generated from coal. More fundamentally, electricity remains only a fifth or so of final energy consumption. The rest is the direct burning of oil, gas and coal for transport, industrial heat, petrochemicals, fertilisers and much else that intermittent solar panels and wind turbines cannot provide for. A technology-neutral electrification target is a tacit admission that the decarbonisation of the other four-fifths will not be delivered by UN declarations.

There is a further twist. The fastest-growing source of new power demand in the rich world is artificial intelligence, and data centres need electricity around the clock. The IEA expects their demand to double by 2030; in the United States, gas already supplies 40% of it, and the IEA credits American data-centre demand with supporting coal burn too. The AI boom is being built on gas, coal and nuclear, because wind, solar and batteries cannot feed a voracious appetite for baseload power.

And the cheapest and most reliable source for much of Asia remains coal. The IEA’s mid-year update now expects global coal demand to rise by 1.2% in 2026 to a record 8.94 billion tonnes, reversing its earlier forecast of decline. China and India together account for around 70% of global consumption. If Old King Coal was the elephant in every meeting room at COP28 in Dubai, in Antalya he will be paying for the room.

Roadmaps to nowhere

At COP30 in Belém, Brazil last year, more than 80 countries backed a “roadmap” to transition away from fossil fuels, but major oil producers and several emerging economies refused any reference to it in the negotiated text. This week Brazil published that voluntary roadmap, declaring the transition urgent and inevitable, while its officials stressed that it was a call to voluntary action and not a document to be negotiated at COP31. The phase-out of fossil fuels is not even a formal agenda item in Antalya. Instead, the talk is of countries following transition roadmaps ‘tailored’ to their own circumstances and constraints, which in practice means each government will do what it was going to do anyway.

Frustrated by the consensus rule that lets oil producers say no, the zealots have started a parallel track. In April, 57 countries met in Santa Marta, Colombia, for the first conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels; China, Russia and the United States were not invited. It produced only voluntary workstreams, and a Fossil Fuel Treaty backed by just 18 countries did not make the final text. David Wojick of CFACT asks whether such a treaty could become a still more radical rival to the UNFCCC, competing for a shrinking pool of money now that Trump’s America has walked away.

The final outcome in Antalya, too, is being pre-softened. Australia and Turkey will produce a “presidency-led” cover decision which, unlike other formal texts, is not negotiated word by word between governments. After 30 years in which every term of every communiqué was fought over through the night, the COP process is drifting from treaty-making towards a bazaar of voluntary pledges on transition roadmaps and electrification.

Meanwhile, the UN has quietly moved the goalposts. UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2026, pointedly titled The Point of Return, concedes that limiting warming to 1.5°C without significant overshoot is no longer achievable. Launching it, Secretary-General António Guterres declared that the mission is now to make any overshoot “as small and as short as possible”. The 1.5°C figure was always an arbitrary limit conjured for the convenience of politicians. Now that it has been formally abandoned, nobody in the climate bureaucracy proposes winding down the apparatus built to defend it. Instead, we get a new target and a plea to return from overshoot.

Delivery without dollars

At one level, every COP is about money: how much Western governments will pay to impose green solutions on themselves, and how much more they will pay, in the form of ‘climate finance’, to persuade the rest of the world to follow. The principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” built that asymmetry into the system. At COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, rich countries pledged $300 billion a year against the $1.3 trillion demanded by developing countries, papering over the gap with a “roadmap” whose first implementation update is due in Antalya.

This year the chequebook is staying shut. An internal EU document seen by Reuters says there is “no scope” for new climate funding commitments at COP31. Instead, Brussels will push a “mitigation package” to turn countries’ existing pledges into real-world emission cuts. In other words: deliver on your promises, but don’t expect us to pay for it.

The EU also wants to globalise the “Just Transition Mechanism” agreed in principle at Belém, modelled on its own scheme for Europe’s coal regions: in effect, a fund for the oil, gas and coal workers to be put out of work while the world “transitions” to renewables. But at the Bonn talks in June, as the African Group demanded grants, Britain insisted the mechanism “is not about finance”. A just transition with no money attached is a slogan, not a mechanism.

Why the sudden parsimony? Trump’s counter-revolution has shut the biggest spigot of all. Antalya is the first COP since America’s second exit from the Paris Agreement took effect, on January 27th 2026, and the White House has announced its withdrawal from the UN Framework Convention itself, the first nation ever to do so. Washington no longer merely abstains from globalist schemes but blocks them, as when its diplomats, with Saudi Arabia, got the International Maritime Organisation to defer its global carbon levy on shipping last year.

Europe cannot fill the gap. The collective West, minus Trump’s America, is itself running on empty: Britain and France are weighed down by massive debts and deficits, Germany is emerging from years of stagnation amid high energy costs and deindustrialisation, and NATO members have pledged to raise defence and security spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. Money spent on tanks and air defences cannot also be spent on solar farms in Africa. For decades, climate finance has been a game of bootleggers and Baptists: pledge allegiance to the cause and collect the grants. Developing countries were always going to put their citizens’ legitimate aspirations ahead of Western demands to forgo the fossil fuels that made the West rich, a form of climate colonialism that Africa’s leaders have increasingly rejected.

Martyrs, campaigners and scapegoats

With Australia holding the gavel, the small island states will again take centre stage, fresh from a Pacific pre-COP and its Taku Pakasoa Declaration. Rupert Darwall, whose new book I recently reviewed, has dissected the role of these “climate martyrs” and their disappearing islands, a staple of every COP. Inconveniently, a 2018 study found that Tuvalu’s land area actually grew by 2.9% between 1971 and 2014.

As usual at the COP carnivals, the NGOs and their media allies will be out in force. After wildfires near Antalya in September, 350.org demanded that Turkey announce a coal phase-out timeline before the summit. For the campaigners, the spoilers of recent COPs are easy to name: a US President who calls climate change a “hoax” and the ‘defeatism’ of Bill Gates, whose U-turn on climate catastrophism gave the game away. That voters and Asian power planners have simply weighed the costs and found Net Zero wanting is not a possibility they entertain.

That leaves Europe and Britain as the last true believers, still preaching the gospel of climate leadership to a congregation that has largely left the church.

COP31, yet another damp squib?

What, then, should we expect from Antalya? A clutch of voluntary pledges; a “roadmap” that nobody is obliged to follow; a “just transition” mechanism without the money to make it work. Plenty of solemn warnings about overshoot, and rather less said about the coal demand records, the gas-fired data centres, the Ceyhan pipeline plans and the Queensland mine extensions. The 100,000 participants will fly home, and the world’s energy system will carry on much as before, governed by the arithmetic of cost, reliability and security rather than the theology of climate conferences.