Mark Hertsgaard
View all posts by Mark Hertsgaard May 11, 2026
Colombia's Environmental Minister Irene Vélez Torres, left, embraces Stientje van Veldhoven, minister of climate policy and green growth of the Netherlands, at the end of a conference aimed at transitioning away from fossil fuels, on April 29, 2026, in Santa Marta, Colombia. AP Photo/Ivan Valencia) This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
Good news about climate change? Hard to believe, but yes. It happened last week in the coal-exporting city of Santa Marta, Colombia, and it ranks as the most promising climate news since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015.
For the first time, a critical mass of the world economy is working together to phase out fossil fuels, a step that scientists have long said is imperative to limit global temperature rise to an amount civilization can survive. This counts as good news not least because it shows that meaningful change is possible, a belief that has been hard to sustain over the past decade. Equally important is what made the Santa Marta breakthrough possible: the advocates of phasing out fossil fuels stopped waiting for the producers of fossil fuels to agree to stop. Instead, advocates will simply stop buying their products.
From April 24 to 29, 57 countries representing most of the biggest economies on Earth gathered in Santa Marta for the First Conference on Transitioning Away From Fossil Fuels, where they pledged to phase out burning oil, gas, and coal, the main driver of global warming. The phase-out will not take place overnight but over the years immediately ahead. France, for example, says it will eliminate coal by 2027, oil by 2045, and gas by 2050. Each country will devise a voluntary national plan to “disentangle their economies and societies” from fossil fuels, said Stientje van Veldhoven, the minister of the environment and housing for The Netherlands, which co-sponsored the conference with Colombia.
Calling themselves “a coalition of the willing,” these 57 countries — including Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Brazil, Canada, and Spain, and joined by California, the world’s fifth biggest economy — make up the largest economic bloc on Earth. Their combined gross domestic product of $38.5 trillion (according to April 2026 data from the International Monetary Fund) is larger than the GDP of the US ($32.4 trillion) and almost twice as large as that of China ($20.9 trillion).
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These countries also account for roughly 30 percent of current global consumption of fossil fuels. If they make good on their pledges to phase out fossil fuels, it will slash demand for those fuels. A basic law of economics is that lower demand leads to lower prices. (At the moment, the world is experiencing the flip side of this law, as oil and gas prices soar due to the supply restrictions in the Strait of Hormuz.) Lower prices for fossil fuels mean lower revenues for fossil fuel producers, which could prove fatal for the profitability of many current and planned projects and infrastructure.
The Santa Marta conference benefitted from an unanticipated coincidence of timing: the Iran war has triggered a historic energy crisis that is causing countries to lose faith in the reliability and affordability of oil and gas. On the second day of the conference, the head of the International Energy Agency declared that the war had broken global energy markets beyond repair. “The damage is done,” Fatih Birol said in an interview with The Guardian. Predicting “permanent consequences” for the fossil fuel industry, Birol said countries will increasingly turn to more secure and less costly renewable energy sources, including by switching to electricity to run transportation and other sectors that historically relied on fossil fuels.
Irene Velez Torres, the environment minister of Colombia, welcomed Birol’s remarks. “Our energy sovereignty as well as our climate survival require moving to other energy sources,” she said in an interview.
To be sure, the transition away from fossil fuels promised in Santa Marta has not happened yet, and there is plenty of room between the lip and the cup. But the economic heft of the Santa Marta coalition of the willing is undeniable, and its biggest members — Germany, California, the UK, France — have already made significant progress toward a non-fossil fueled future. Indeed, a core purpose of the Santa Marta conference was for participants to share lessons with one another about how best to leave fossil fuels behind. “This conference is not about [negotiating] documents,” said Rachel Kyte, the UK special representative for climate. “It’s about finding fellow travelers and learning from them — what’s working, what isn’t?”
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The fact that the Santa Marta conference got little news coverage in the U.S. and that its greatest power lies in the realm of economics rather than politics may help explain why many observers have not yet recognized its game-changing potential. From the time climate change first emerged on the global agenda with the United Nations “Earth Summit” in 1992, the dominant narrative has measured progress through the lens of politics: how many governments sign legally binding agreements to limit global temperature rise, and by how much? This prioritizing of politics is no surprise: most of the people involved in these negotiations — the diplomats conducting them, the scientists and activists seeking to influence them, the journalists covering them — regard governments as the decisive actors in international affairs and have little or no training in economics.
This approach has yielded little progress. With the important exception of the Paris Agreement, where virtually all of the world’s countries agreed to limit temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and to aim for 1.5 degrees, the annual UN climate summits have been long on talk and short on action. Most of their elaborately negotiated agreements did not even mention the words “fossil fuels,” even though phasing them out is the core challenge.
The UN process has fallen short largely because a loophole gives fossil fuel-producing countries a de facto veto over final agreements. UN summits are conducted under UN rules, which require consensus decision making. “Consensus” does not mean “unanimous,” but it does mean that a handful of countries can block what a vast majority wants. That’s what happened at the COP30 summit last November, when Saudi Arabia led a group of petrostates in blocking a call by 85 countries to begin drawing up a global roadmap to phase out fossil fuels.
The Santa Marta conference organizers skirted these obstacles by operating separately from the UN process and inviting only participants that had shown a genuine commitment to moving beyond fossil fuels. That meant no U.S. and no China. The proceedings were not diverted into debating whether fossil fuels need to go but rather could focus on how to make that happen, and to do so while protecting workers, businesses, and communities that currently rely on fossil fuels for jobs, profits, and tax revenues.
Santa Marta is only a first step. In a world where fossil fuels account for roughly 80 percent of total energy use, leaving them behind is no small task, as The Netherlands itself illustrates. In the same week that it was co-sponsoring the Santa Marta conference, the Dutch government approved plans to increase offshore gas production. Asked about this contradiction, Minister van Veldhoven explained that the supply disruptions stemming from the Iran war meant that in the short term The Netherlands could obtain the gas its residents and businesses need only by producing its own or buying it from Russia, and the latter course was worse on both energy security and climate grounds. This conundrum, she added, “illustrates the very difficult issues facing us and all countries as we try to disentangle ourselves from reliance on fossil fuels.”
