COP31 Opens in Antalya With 35-by-35 Electrification Target in Play

COP31 opens today in Antalya, Turkey, with a headline number already circulating among negotiators: push global electrification from roughly 23% today to about 35% by 2035. Two weeks of talks will test whether a world in the grip of an energy shock can agree on the fastest electrification pathway in the process's 31-year history.

The setting is unusual. The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, now in its ninth month, has closed the Strait of Hormuz and sent oil and natural gas prices spiking. That shock hangs over the negotiations — and, unusually, it strengthens the hand of the clean-technology side of the agenda.

Kingsmill Bond, an analyst at the energy think tank Ember, argues this crisis differs from the 1970s oil shock and the energy disruption that followed Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. "This is the first time you've really had a global energy shock where you've got really cheap solutions to address it," he says.

Those solutions are concrete: solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles. In recent months, countries have pivoted sharply toward these technologies, many of them produced in China. Bond says the economics will make it easier for governments to back them in Antalya: "There's much more opportunity, I think, for people to get behind change at COP."

The takeaway: this is the first COP where the cheapest way out of an energy crisis and the climate agenda point in the same direction.

What does the 'electrification COP' target actually say?

Solar, batteries and EVs all fall under what analysts call electrification technologies — and that framing has earned COP31 its informal label. "The electrification COP," Bond says, is what some are already calling it.

The core goal is numeric and dated. "The big target that the COP is setting is for the world to increase the electrification rate from around 23% today to around 35% by 2035," Bond says. "So 35 by '35 is the mantra."

The target assumes countries grow their electricity mix with cleaner renewables. Energy experts call that reasonable, because it's what the data has shown in recent years: large solar and wind projects now deliver more cost-competitive energy than natural gas and coal projects, according to the financial services firm Lazard.

"Think about solar, wind," says Li Shuo, director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. "More green energy will help you decarbonize better and faster."

In plain terms: a 12-percentage-point electrification gain in a decade, riding on renewables that already beat gas and coal on cost.

Is there a roadmap off fossil fuels?

Many countries argue the U.N. process has spent 31 years dodging the biggest driver of climate change: burning fossil fuels. Producers such as Saudi Arabia and Russia have consistently opposed fossil fuel language in final conference agreements.

The response is now running on a parallel track. In April, more than 50 countries met at the First International Conference to Transition Away from Fossil Fuels — organizers told NPR the event was designed to complement, not replace, the U.N. process.

More than 25 of those nations are developing a legally binding treaty to advance a fossil fuel phase-out. The Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative's supporters hope COP31 recruits more signatories in Antalya.

That's a second number to watch: whether the 25-nation treaty bloc grows before the closing gavel.

Who isn't in the room?

The U.S. State Department told NPR by email that it will send no delegation to COP31. It also skipped last year's COP in Brazil. The Trump administration has phased out subsidies for electric vehicles, solar and wind, reduced greenhouse gas regulations and halted renewable energy projects.

Some delegations welcomed the absence last year. "Generally, it's a good thing they're not here because we have less recalcitrants to deal with," Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu's minister of climate change, told NPR at the time.

But Democrats are coming — among them Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, fresh off his party's midterm sweep. He and other lawmakers plan to keep pressure on fossil fuels and a potential carbon pricing mechanism. "It cannot remain free for the fossil fuel industry to pollute if we want to have any chance of a pathway to climate safety," Whitehouse says.

What decides what happens next

The milestone that matters is the final text: whether the 35%-by-2035 electrification target survives Saudi and Russian resistance to fossil fuel language, and whether the 25-nation treaty coalition adds members in Antalya before the talks close in two weeks.