The United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary, Marco Rubio, arrived in New Delhi today for a high-stakes bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The agenda, dominated by energy security, reflects a growing recognition that the global energy architecture must be restructured with urgency. The talks occur against a backdrop of volatile fossil fuel markets and accelerating climate breakdown, where every degree of warming compounds the risk to human civilization.
The core of the discussion revolved around diversifying supply chains for critical minerals and accelerating the deployment of renewable energy infrastructure. India, the world's third-largest energy consumer, is caught between its developmental aspirations and the physical limits of a warming planet. The UK, having halved its emissions since 1990 while growing its economy, offers a template for decoupling growth from carbon. But the challenge is not merely technical. It is political, economic, and deeply existential.
Rubio emphasised that energy security in 2025 is synonymous with climate resilience. The old paradigm of securing oil and gas supplies is insufficient when those very supplies are the primary drivers of biosphere destabilisation. The UK-India partnership is now centred on scaling up green hydrogen, solar microgrids, and battery storage. These are not distant aspirations but operational realities that must be deployed at gigawatt scale within this decade.
Modi reiterated India's commitment to achieving 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030, a target that aligns with keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. However, the pace of installation lags behind the required ramp. The country added roughly 18 GW of renewable capacity in 2024, but the International Energy Agency estimates that 50 GW per year is needed to meet the target. The gap is a chasm, and it is widening.
The meeting also addressed the geopolitical dimensions of the energy transition. Rare earth elements, lithium, and cobalt are concentrated in a handful of nations, creating new dependencies that could replicate the vulnerabilities of the oil era. The UK and India agreed to form a joint task force to secure supply chains and invest in recycling technologies. This is not merely prudent. It is essential to avoid trading one form of energy insecurity for another.
What was left unsaid but hung in the air is the reality of the biosphere collapse. We are losing ice at an accelerating rate. The Amazon is approaching a tipping point. Coral reefs are bleaching in near-real time. These are not future scenarios. They are current news reports from the front lines of a planet under duress. The diplomatic language of 'energy security' is a polite way of saying we must fundamentally reorganise our economies within a decade or face cascading, irreversible changes.
Rubio's visit coincides with the release of new data from the UK Met Office showing that 2024 was the hottest year on record, with global average temperatures 1.45 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The margin for error is gone. Every major industrialised nation must now treat the energy transition as a wartime mobilisation. India and the UK, bound by history and common law, are attempting to build a model of cooperation that can be replicated across the Commonwealth and beyond.
The outcomes of this summit are not likely to be dramatic. They will be measured in memoranda of understanding, technology transfers, and financial commitments. But the direction is clear. We are moving from a fossil-fuelled world to something else. The question is whether we can move fast enough. The science is settled. The physics does not negotiate. The only variable left is human agency.
