Around 60 governments, including Nigeria, Brazil, Germany, and Canada, will hold the first international meeting this week to discuss phasing out fossil fuels, as the Iran war upends global oil and gas markets and sends prices soaring. The gathering of ministers and officials in Santa Marta, Colombia, which starts on Tuesday, will focus on practical steps to shift economies away from fossil fuels, rather than setting new global targets of the kind agreed at U.N.
climate summits. Ministers and climate envoys aim to revive the transition from fossil fuels at the inaugural conference in Santa Marta, one of the country’s busiest coal hubs, in a nation heavily reliant on energy exports. The two-day conference bypasses the United Nations climate talks and reflects a growing impatience with its failure to tackle fossil fuels, the main driver of global warming.
“People seem refreshed to be able to talk about these issues without having to sort of argue the existential question of — do we need to do this at all?” the UK’s special climate envoy Rachel Kyte told AFP in Santa Marta on Monday. As government delegates arrived Monday, climate activists and Indigenous groups protested against fossil fuels on the streets and beaches of the Caribbean port town where coal tankers dot the ocean horizon.
The conference is not expected to produce binding commitments, but a scientific panel has asked governments taking part to consider a halt on new fossil fuel expansion, among other proposals. On the list of attendees are major fossil fuel producers Canada, Norway, and Australia, and developing oil giants Nigeria, Angola, and Brazil.
They join major energy-consuming nations in the European Union, coal-reliant emerging markets, Turkey, and Vietnam, and small island nation states extremely vulnerable to climate shocks. The world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases — including the United States, China, and India — are not attending, nor are oil-rich Gulf states.
The conference was announced late last year, but organisers say the US-Israel attacks on Iran had bolstered the case for a fossil fuel phaseout as nations confronted a sudden shortage of oil and gas. “Fossil fuels are now clearly to be seen as a source of instability,” Kyte told AFP in an interview.