Trump’s unprovoked war with Iran has so far proved to be an unmitigated disaster with one, largely unfortunate, upside: It’s revealed the inherent instability of an economy entirely dependent on fossil fuels.
The economic shockwaves emanating from the Middle East as Iran maintains its pressure on a major artery in the global circulation of oil have woken the world up. Now, people and their governments around the world understand, for reasons entirely unrelated to climate change, the urgency of abandoning oil in favor of solar and wind and those renewable sources of energy that can guarantee stable and affordable electricity.
So, this month, we’re looking back at an international conference with somewhat serendipitous timing, the first-ever Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels meeting, which took place at the end of April in Santa Marta, Colombia, and throughout which the war in the Middle East was a constant topic of conversation.
Happy Reading,
Syris Valentine
The Fossil Fuels Phaseout Has Begun
Picture a beach on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, and images of aquamarine waves sloshing onto sun-washed beaches as jungle-covered hills roll behind them will likely dominate your cerebral landscape. Nowhere in your mental picture will you likely find a deepwater port where millions of tons of coal tumble into cargo ships bound for Europe. In Santa Marta, however, idyllic oceanside scenery and a planet-threatening export meet.
Given the city serves as a main terminal through which coal leaves Colombia, the country’s Minister of Environment and Sustainability, Irene Vélez Torres, felt that Santa Marta would be an ideal location for the first-ever Conference for Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, which brought together at the end of April ministers and diplomats from 57 different countries from around the world to begin the search for a way to free the world from an economy chained to fossil fuels. The city and its surrounding region shows all that we have to save in that quest and the challenges that come with it.
“When COVID hit, the second largest coal company in the region decided to close [two mines] overnight and left us a hole,” Vélez Torres said during a press briefing at the opening of the conference. “We currently have enormous mining pits and an environmental damage that we still don’t know how we are going to repair.”
The damage wrought by these open pit mines is immediately evident in satellite imagery where the verdant landscape is otherwise only interrupted by mountain folds, farm tracts, and the occasional town — many of which sit a short walk from a mine’s edge.