Santa Marta may be a game-changing moment

SANTA MARTA, Colombia – “You are the light in a tunnel of darkness,” climate scientist Johan Rockstrom told delegates at the First Conference on Transitioning Away From Fossil Fuels this week in Santa Marta, Colombia.

After years of United Nations (UN) climate summits rarely even mentioning the words “fossil fuels,” 57 countries representing one-third of the world’s economy came to Santa Marta to discuss not whether, but how, to leave behind the primary driver of climate change.

This potentially historic development drew strong media interest: 146 journalists from 61 news outlets and 28 countries attended in person, countless more followed the livestream, and abundant news coverage appeared around the world, according to the governments of Colombia and the Netherlands, the conference’s co-sponsors.

The gathering got an unexpected boost when the head of the International Energy Agency said in an interview with The Guardian that the Iran war has broken fossil fuel markets beyond repair. The interruptions to oil and gas supplies and the resulting price spikes, said Fatih Birol, will forever turn countries away from fossil fuels and toward more secure renewable energy sources. “The damage is done,” added Birol, whose agency the New York Times has described as “enormously influential” on the long-term plans of energy companies and investors around the world.

Irene Velez Torres, the environment minister of Colombia, welcomed Birol’s comments.

“It seems that many of us are seeing at the same time that fossil fuels cannot provide energy security, because fossil fuels are subject to scarcity, and scarcity can be manipulated,” she said in an interview with Covering Climate Now.

The conference is separate from the UN process, so the goal was not to negotiate a legal agreement but to learn from everyone — including businesses, indigenous peoples, and other parts of civil society — about the best ways to disentangle economies and societies from fossil fuels. Each country’s roadmap will be voluntary and specific to its own circumstances.

“This conference is not about documents,” said Rachel Kyte, the United Kingdom special representative for climate. “It’s about finding fellow travelers and learning from them — what’s working, what isn’t?”

For example, France released what it called the first national roadmap by a developed country to phase out fossil fuels. The plan foresees removing coal from the national electricity grid by 2027, ending oil consumption by 2045, and gas by 2050.

The Chinese electric car giant BYD and the Australian mining company Fortescue hosted a private sector roundtable aboard what Fortescue said was the world’s first cargo ship powered completely without fossil fuels. The company urged businesses and governments to pursue “real zero” emissions rather than the “net zero” goal that employs carbon offsets and allows continued emissions.

Asked about the 80% to 89% of people around the world who want stronger climate action, Ana Toni, the Brazilian diplomat who served as executive director of the COP30 UN climate summit, urged citizens to act “at the national level. There are elections coming up, and what consumer choices people make also matter.”

The Santa Marta conference’s conclusions are aimed at accelerating progress at COP31 this coming November, but its larger impact may come from the economic heft of the conference’s “coalition of the willing.” Joined in Santa Marta by California, the world’s fifth biggest economy, these countries account for 30% of global fossil fuel consumption. Withdrawing that buying power from oil, gas, and coal over the coming years could accelerate the retreat from fossil fuels foreseen by Birol.

Santa Marta may be a game-changing moment in the climate story, and journalists have an abundance of story lines to explore in the months ahead. Will the stirring rhetoric that governments expressed in Santa Marta be matched by policies they implement back home? Will more countries and subnational governments join their ranks? How will the big emitters that did not attend — the United States, China, and other fossil fuel-producing states and companies — react?

A follow-up conference will take place in February 2027, hosted by the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu and co-sponsored by Ireland.

“This is not the end,” Velez declared in the conference’s closing moments. “It is the beginning of a new global climate democracy.” – Rappler.com

This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now, co-founded by Mark Hertsgaard.