U.S. Is Missing the Century’s ‘Greatest Economic Opportunity,’ U.N. Chief Says

The United Nations secretary general’s speech on Tuesday was billed as a rare, optimistic one on the future of climate change.

Look at the cold, hard economic data, António Guterres, the U.N. chief, said, and you will see that the world’s transition from polluting fossil fuels to cleaner renewable energy is “unstoppable.”

But then there was the matter of the world’s largest economy, the United States.

President Trump pulled the United States out of the main international agreement to limit climate change and has, with Congress, sought to cripple domestic wind and solar power industries, the growth of electric vehicles and climate science research.

The United States and those that follow its lead are “missing the greatest economic opportunity of the 21st century,” said Mr. Guterres. Their policies have imperiled global progress through the “clear market distortion” of subsidizing fossil fuels at a nine-to-one ratio against renewables.

And yet even against those odds, Mr. Guterres said, he was “never more confident that they will fail, because we have passed the point of no return.”

That is debatable. A country’s energy choices are subject to change amid the shifting winds of technological innovation and geopolitics. But Mr. Guterres said he saw economics as destiny. “Just follow the money,” he said.

Last year, he said, renewable energy received more than double the investment fossil fuels did, further widening a decade-long trend. Data compiled by the International Renewable Energy Agency showed that almost all new electricity generation built last year came from renewables and that renewables generated almost a third of all the world’s electricity.

Solar power in particular had seen plunging costs of production, he pointed out, making it all the more alluring not just from a climate-change standpoint but also from a national-budget one. “Solar, not so long ago four times the cost of fossil fuels, is now 41 percent cheaper,” he said.

That’s where the world’s second-largest economy, China, comes in.

Over the past decade, China has gone from a largely coal-powered economy to one that is deploying more renewable energy than anywhere else. It now dominates the production of solar panels and batteries, the most essential and widespread components of the global energy transition.

The perception of Chinese products as cheap and low quality is only half true in the world of solar power. The panels are inexpensive, yes, but they are durable, too, and in a world without tariffs, most analysts say they would wipe out all competition. Even with tariffs they mostly have done that.

The speed of the energy transition, climate scientists say, is of the essence, and making renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels is a forceful push in that direction.

But global greenhouse gas emissions, largely from the burning of fossil fuels, are still on the rise. All those megatons of carbon and methane emissions are compounding the greenhouse effect, making the world, on average, warmer and wetter, throwing the planet’s temperature-sensitive climatic systems out of whack.

Ten years ago, all the world’s countries, including the United States, signed the Paris Agreement, which aimed to limit global warming to one and a half degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages. Last year was the first in which global temperatures averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above those the planet experienced at the start of the industrial age. And this year, President Trump moved to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, as he did in his first term.

In rich countries, much of that increased demand comes from data centers that house artificial intelligence servers that must be constantly cooled. Relatively wealthy countries like the United States, Canada, Australia and Saudi Arabia are also the world’s biggest producers of fossil fuels.

In developing countries, rapid industrialization and the simple math of burgeoning populations have arguably made their energy choices the ultimate arbiter of when the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases might peak.

Scientists say they must peak more or less immediately if humanity, collectively, is to avoid the increasingly catastrophic effects of climate change — effects that knock into each other like dominoes, compounding one another and bringing misery to rich and poor alike.

This November, for the 30th time, the world’s countries will gather for the United Nation’s flagship annual climate negotiations, this year in Brazil. The United States will most likely be largely absent.

If the summits of the past few years are any indication, developing countries will accuse rich ones, which are responsible for the historical balance of emissions, of not doing enough to lead the transition to cleaner energy sources and help poorer countries afford to do so as well. Few expect an agreement to end the use of coal and oil, the most polluting fuels.