On 27-29 April, nearly 60 nations, representing a third of the global economy, convened in Santa Marta, Colombia, not merely to deplore the climate crisis but to commit — voluntarily — to mapping a path away from fossil fuels entirely.
The event was unprecedented. And inevitably, the question raised was: will any of it actually happen?
The case for optimism begins with the economics. For the first time in history, the phaseout of fossil fuels is not simply a global imperative — it is increasingly a financial one.
Solar and wind energy are now cheaper than coal in many parts of the world. Battery storage is advancing rapidly. The International Energy Agency has noted that investments in clean energy now outpace investments in fossil fuels globally. The energy transition, in other words, is already underway. Santa Marta did not ignite it; it attempted to accelerate it.
At the conference, governments that were represented were asked to develop national “roadmaps” setting out how they will end the production and use of fossil fuels.
The voluntary plans will form the bedrock of a new initiative to wean the world off coal, oil, and gas, the focus of the recent two days of intensive talks in Colombia.
The approach marks a departure from the annual UN climate negotiations, which have run for more than three decades even as greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise.
Yet the structural obstacles are formidable. For instance, the world’s largest emitters — the US, China, India, and Russia — were absent, and so were the petro states — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar.
The absences were not incidental. They represented the gravitational center of the fossil fuel economy. A coalition of the willing that excludes the unwilling is, at best, an inspiring beginning and, at worst, an elaborate exercise in preaching to the converted.
The voluntary nature of the national roadmaps compounds this concern. There are no binding deadlines, no enforcement mechanisms, no penalties for non-compliance.
History offers little comfort here. The Paris Agreement — the international treaty on climate change adopted by 195 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, France on 12 December 2015 with a goal to holding the increase in average global temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century was also historic, also celebrated — yet global emissions have continued to rise in the years since.
Then there is the question of cost — financial, political, and human. Fossil fuel-dependent economies, particularly in the developing world, face a wrenching transition. Colombia itself exports coal in vast quantities. Nigeria, Venezuela, and dozens of other nations have built their social contracts around petroleum revenues. Asking them to phase out their primary source of national income without commensurate international financing is not a policy — it is a wish.
The Santa Marta communiqué acknowledged this, calling for debt relief and financial support for poorer nations, but the actual sums committed remain vague and modest against the scale of what is needed.
How long, then, might this take? The most credible scientific pathways to limiting warming to 1.5°C require eliminating most fossil fuel use by 2050. That is 25 years — a geological eye blink, a political eternity. At current rates of transition, that target won’t be met.
What Santa Marta represents is not a solution but a new political architecture: a space outside the paralyzed consensus of the UN system where genuinely willing nations can move faster, set examples, and perhaps drag the reluctant along in their wake.
Is the vision quixotic? Partly. The windmills are real. But unlike Don Quixote, the delegates in Santa Marta are not delusional about the nature of the enemy. They know exactly what they are fighting and why.
The question is whether 30 or 40 nations acting boldly can eventually compel the rest of the world to follow, as had happened before in history when coalitions of the principled moved ahead of the cautious majority.
The answer is: possibly. Not certainly. Not soon enough. But possibly, and in the politics of climate change, possibility is not nothing. It may, in fact, be everything.