International talks in Brazil to curb climate change will prove doubters wrong and show that most countries are shifting towards clean energy, Ed Miliband has said.

Speaking in Brazil, the energy secretary said that acting to rein in the greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming would create jobs and protect future generations.

“The action and the atmosphere at this summit, in my view, already demonstrates that the doubters are wrong. The vast majority of the world continues to act on clean energy,” he told The Times as the Cop30 climate summit got under way in Belem.

The fortnight-long conference, which starts on Monday, is effectively the deadline by which nations must present plans for cutting emissions, but is taking place in the shadow of a backlash led by President Trump. No high-level American official is at the summit, despite the US being the world’s second-biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions after China.

“The world is moving on climate and clean energy, but it needs to move faster,” Miliband said.

“We are going to unashamedly say that this shows that multilateralism can work. Working together is the right thing for Britain.”

The minister cited the prediction that the Earth had been on course for 4C of global warming before the 2015 Paris Agreement, a temperature rise that would have been disastrous, but is now heading for about 2.5C. “That shows the progress that has been made,” he said.

Miliband said the Cop30 talks with 196 other countries and the EU would matter for Britons who had more immediate concerns such as inflation. “It matters precisely because of the cost of living, because if we are going to create good jobs for the future, this is the biggest potential opportunity we have,” he said.

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A book published on November 5 by Lord Stern of Brentford, a renowned economist who produced a major climate report for Gordon Brown, said action on climate change was not an obstacle to prosperity but was “the only really sensible way of driving growth”.

Stern told The Times his message to the Tories, who recently joined Reform in calling for the scrapping of Britain’s 2050 net zero target, was that renewables and green technology were “your growth story”.

Miliband echoed that view. “We need to move faster, because it’s in our national interest in terms of jobs and economic growth,” he said.

The government’s plans would create 400,000 new clean energy jobs by 2030, the energy secretary added. He also said action on climate change would create “huge opportunities for exports” including for “mini” nuclear power stations being developed by Rolls-Royce.

Labour has been criticised by environmentalists for refusing to pay into a new fund to save rainforests, launched by Brazil on November 6. Miliband blamed the coming budget, which is expected to bring in tax rises to repair public finances. “We’ve obviously got a difficult fiscal event coming up, so we weren’t in a position to make a financial contribution at this stage to the TFFF,” he said, referring to the rainforest fund.

One of the architects of the Paris Agreement said that progress on climate change was being driven more by the falling cost of clean energy than by government negotiations.

Christiana Figueres, who was UN climate chief when the deal was reached, said: “Ten years ago, the logic of climate was climate politics. Today, the logic of climate is climate economics, because the technologies that we’re using [to replace fossil fuels] are cheaper, they’re better-performing, and they’re faster to build.”

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According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, solar power is now on average 41 per cent cheaper than fossil fuels. Electric cars are already cheaper to run than petrol models.

“The implementation of the Paris Agreement is not just working but is accelerating beyond what we possibly could have thought of ten years ago,” Figueres added. “Investment in renewables is already two times higher than in fossil fuels.”

She said countries are shifting to clean energy faster than implied by their climate targets, some of which she said had been less ambitious than planned because of “the bullying we see from Washington”.

Figueres said: “Are we going in the right direction? Absolutely. Do we have to go to more scale and more speed? Absolutely. But you cannot argue that the Paris Agreement is unsuccessful.”