UK Prime Minister's COP31 Speech: Another Opportunity Missed?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Yesterday morning, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham delivered a short but targeted speech at the COP31 Conference, held this year in Turkey.

His speech, which lasted only 5 minutes, touched on a number of key areas, pertinent to decreasing energy bills, halting climate change, and stemming the UK’s reliance on fossil fuels beyond a backdrop of global market volatility.

Starting off strong, the Prime Minister called out dependence on fossil fuels as the root of rising energy prices, whilst also proclaiming climate change as a national threat; declaring a ‘new era’ of British leadership.

Throughout his speech, Burnham focused heavily on the role of electrification, referenced the increasing role of heat pumps in ‘cheap’ domestic energy generation, and even mentioned Rolls Royce’s Small Modular Reactors as the UK’s shields against global fossil fuel shocks, together with announcing the UK government’s support of 2 major offshore wind projects, which he stated would bring in “billions of pounds of investment, power millions of homes, and support thousands of jobs”.

And, whilst these are all promising and important points, elevating the crucial role of renewable and clean energy in reducing the impact of climate change, supporting the UK’s quest for long term energy security and bringing down energy prices for our homes and businesses, there are some glaringly obvious gaps in his speech that need to be addressed:

1. The human and ecological cost of batteries: although the Prime Minister’s focus on electrification didn’t overtly mention battery usage and storage, it did mention the role of electrification in bringing people’s energy bills down, and we can therefore assume that part of the wider strategy of achieving this does include Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), not to mention the role of batteries in Electric Vehicles. As such, a question arises around the human and ecological cost of mining for the materials needed to produce said batteries. The heavy reliance on critical minerals like cobalt - frequently tied to severe labour exploitation, human rights abuses, and ecological destruction in the Democratic Republic of Congo - means that shifting emissions away from tailpipes can sometimes just export environmental and social damage elsewhere.

2. The economics of intermittent clean energy resources: whilst wind power is considered a cornerstone of decarbonisation, it’s no secret that offshore wind farms are extremely expensive to build, and only produce intermittent power - when the wind doesn’t blow, there’s no power to harvest. As such, wind farms tend to succeed only on very blustery days, and as a counterpart to other forms of energy generation.

3. The continuous oversight of biomethane: This speech would have been the ideal opportunity to mention the role of biomethane in support of energy security; homegrown, always-on, renewable energy pumped straight from the source to local homes and businesses for sustainable heat and power. However, just like its blatant omission in the recent Autumn Budget for 2026, biomethane was nowhere to be seen. Couple this with the government’s refusal to announce a successor to the Green Gas Support Scheme, and the continuous oversight of biomethane is starting to create a problem. Biomethane is key to the UK’s long term energy independence, as well as the creation of thousands of skilled, well-paid, rewarding jobs up and down the country, and supporting British arable farms with a nutrient rich fertiliser; biomethane production has the potential to become a very real, much needed asset to UK renewable energy generation, so why is it being continually ignored?

In short, whilst Burnham’s speech was encouraging, and addressed a number of important climate and energy issues experienced here in the UK, it could have gone a lot further, and achieved a lot more.