SANTA MARTA, Colombia – Global climate talks got an unexpected boost on Friday, April 24, when the head of the International Energy Agency said the Iran war had broken the fossil fuel market beyond repair.
“The damage has been done,” Fatih Birol said in an interview with Guardian. The interruption of the war in the supply of oil and gas resulting in the increase in the price of energy, fertilizers and other essential products, Birol added, will be forever. turn the country away from energy towards renewable energy and other safe and cheap sources of energy.
“The vase has been broken, the damage has been done – it will be very difficult to put the pieces back together,” said Birol, whose agent New York Times has described it as having a “significant influence” on the long-term plans of energy companies and investors around the world. “This (crisis) will have lasting consequences for the global energy market for many years to come.”
“I am very happy that Birol is saying this,” Irene Velez Torres, Colombia’s environment minister, said in an interview in Santa Marta, the host city of a conference where some of the world’s largest economies are meeting next week to develop a global “map” to end the burning of oil, gas, and coal, the main driver of dangerous climate change.
“It makes me more optimistic about what our conference can achieve,” Velez Torres added. “It seems that many of us see at the same time that fossil fuels cannot provide energy security, because fossil fuels are facing shortages, and shortages can be replaced. Our energy authority, as well as our climate life, needs to move to other sources of energy.”
Although Birol has previously said the drop in prices for renewables signals “the beginning of the end of the oil era,” he has rarely if ever openly portrayed the oil industry as a dead man – a comment that could further anger the administration of US President Donald Trump, which has threatened to withdraw the US from the IEA.
Chris Wright, the US energy secretary, has he demanded that the IEA stop publishing an annual report detailing how countries can eliminate their emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050, as scientists say is necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The United States provides about 14% of the IEA’s annual budget.
The meeting of Santa Marta, officially called First International Conference on the Transition Off Fossil Fuels and sponsored by the Netherlands, brings together governments representing many of the world’s economies, as well as hundreds of academics, climate and labor activists, business leaders, and representatives of indigenous peoples. The plans for the meeting took on new urgency after the meeting The latest UN climate conference in Novemberwhen a few petroleum nations used UN rules that require consensus decisions to resist calls from 85 countries to create a road map to phase out fossil fuels.
Among the governments represented in Santa Marta are Germany, Great Britain, CaliforniaFrance, Italy, Brazil, Canada, Spain, Mexico and Australia – 10 out of 13 the largest economy in the world. Together, these countries are equal great economic power whose combined heft is greater than that of the United States and twice that of China. If this “coalition of the willing” removes its large purchasing power from fossil fuels in the coming years, as Birol sees it, it will reduce the demand for fossil fuels, make many of the industry’s production projects unprofitable, and could trigger a global return from fossil fuels.
Something similar happened after the 2015 Paris Agreement, when countries pledged to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and target 1.5ºC. In response, governments and industry scaled back the expansion of oil, gas, and coal production while increasing investment in solar, wind, batteries, and other non-carbon energy sources. Five years later, emissions reductions had reduced the projected increase in global warming from 4ºC to 2.7ºC – still a lot, but a big step in the right direction.
In another departure from UN climate summits, the Santa Marta meeting is “listening to science” instead of listening to “misinformation and influence,” Velez Torres said. Global warming is already “crossing the points that will weaken the human race in our lifetime,” said Johan Rockstrom of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Rockstrom and Carlos Nobre, a senior scientist at the National Amazon Research Institute in Brazil, have assembled a panel of scientists to advise governments on which policies work best to phase out fossil fuels.
“A significant number of 30 countries are (already) decarbonizing their economies, showing that it can be done,” Rockstrom said. “We are not here to introduce new climate science but to facilitate better and faster policy making by governments, businesses, and all stakeholders.”
The Santa Marta meeting, which ends on April 29, is the first step, said Velez Torres. A follow-up meeting to improve plans for how countries, regions and economic sectors can leave fossil fuels behind – without harming workers, businesses and governments that currently rely on fossil fuels for jobs, profits and tax revenue – is scheduled for later this year.
The results of the meeting will also be directed at the discussions of the next UN climate conference, which will be held in Turkey in November. But after years of “pressure and vetoes” from petrostates “against us talking about ending fossil fuels,” Velez Torres said, “here we have an organization that is ready to take action.” – Rappler.com
This article is published as part of a global journalism collaboration Covering the Weather Now, founded by Mark Hertsgaard.
