Fossil Fuel Exit Club

For the first time, a coalition of 57 countries have convened outside the UN climate architecture with a single mandate: urgently agree on how to phase out fossil fuels.

The meeting in Santa Marta comes at a moment when energy security and climate policy are at odds. With the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil flows, disrupted by the ongoing war in Iran, energy markets are in turmoil. Price volatility has ripped through every economy that still runs on oil and gas. With peace talks in Pakistan on stop-start mode, there is no clear end in sight.

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Despite geopolitical pressure, a new coalition led by former Irish President Mary Robinson, alongside international policymakers and scientists, is working toward a coordinated phase-out pathway for oil, gas, and coal. The panel is focused on three practical problems: the cost of capital trapping fossil fuel-dependent economies in debt cycles; how to manage existing and newly discovered supply against falling demand; and the price premium still attached to decarbonising hard-to-abate sectors.

Robinson was direct on what the current crisis exposes. “Oil prices don’t just stay in energy markets — they move straight into people’s lives. Impacts are hitting the most vulnerable hardest, as always, while oil companies reap windfall profits.”

Colombian Environment Minister Susana Muhamad has argued that the ongoing war in the Middle East should accelerate — not delay — the energy transition, despite deep tension between fossil fuel dependence and climate commitments across Latin America. “The crisis — and let’s call it what it is — the war in the Middle East has triggered a global crisis. In this case, I believe the movement should be toward radicalising the green agenda and the transitions,” she said.

Colombia itself sits at the centre of that contradiction. A major oil exporter and Amazonian biodiversity hub, it is now pushing for a coordinated global phase-out. Financing constraints, debt pressure, and energy security concerns continue to shape how quickly that transition can move.

The Santa Marta coalition was built after repeated failures at UN climate summits. At COP after COP since, petrostates have successfully blocked fossil fuel language from formal outcomes, most recently stripping all such references from the COP30 final document in Belém. The goal now is to develop a transition roadmap, feeding into COP31 in Antalya, Turkey, later this year.

The Chief Brief Take:

The gathering in Colombia tells only part of the story. The part that’s missing may matter most.

Major fossil fuel producers including Canada, Norway, and Australia are represented, alongside Nigeria and a broad spread of energy importers including EU member states, the United Kingdom, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. But the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia are absent. Together, those three countries account for nearly half of global oil production.

China and India are absent too. The world’s two largest coal producers and the biggest consumers of fossil fuel energy. The war in Iran has exposed just how structurally dependent Asian economies remain on Gulf oil. Fuel shortages have hit import-dependent nations hard, with price spikes feeding through into household costs, industrial slowdowns, and currency pressure across the region. The nations most acutely exposed to fossil fuel price shocks are not at the table.

China’s trajectory on renewables is accelerating, but it remains the world’s largest coal consumer, burning more than half of global supply. India’s energy security is shaped by industrial growth demands that coal currently underpins. Neither has shown appetite for the supply-side commitments this initiative is pushing toward.

The Santa Marta format is designed to work around this. By operating outside the traditional COP architecture, the coalition requires no consensus, has no veto mechanism, and has kept industry lobbyists out entirely.

But that same structure creates the initiative’s credibility problem. Any phase-out pathway that excludes the world’s biggest producers, consumers, and emitters is, structurally, an incomplete one.

The question is whether this coalition can function as a pressure mechanism on the broader COP process, or whether it becomes an echo chamber.

The answer depends on what Santa Marta actually produces. Enforceable economic and political commitments, rather than the usual climate declarations and ambitions.

So far, the world’s largest producers and emitters are sitting it out. The real work of this coalition will be to win over those who didn’t come.