Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Colombia hosts a climate summit, acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez takes an international trip, and researchers estimate the cost of U.S. boat strikes.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.

The highlights this week: Colombia hosts a climate summit, acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez takes an international trip, and researchers estimate the cost of U.S. boat strikes.

Farewell to Fossil Fuels?

Envoys from dozens of countries, including major oil producers such as Canada and Norway, attended a first-of-its-kind climate summit in Santa Marta, Colombia, this week. The event focused on a topic that environmentalists have long struggled to advance in United Nations climate negotiations: the economic transition away from fossil fuels.

U.N. climate talks have long haggled over greenhouse gas emissions levels rather than targeting fossil fuel use itself. But at its conference in Brazil in November, known as COP30, more than 80 governments backed the idea of national plans to move away from fossil fuels.

The motion was quashed in the full plenary of around 190 countries, where decisions require unanimity. Key detractors included Russia and Saudi Arabia. That failure triggered this week’s summit in Santa Marta, which took place outside the U.N. framework. Colombia co-hosted the event with the Netherlands.

Rather than hammering out a joint text, participants spent their time brainstorming in a series of workshops. “We can do better than what we’re currently doing at the COP,” European Union climate chief Wopke Hoekstra told journalists this week at the summit. “Part of the future of international climate diplomacy will be about plurilateral initiatives.”

Participants at the Santa Marta conference discussed the nuts and bolts of creating national transition road maps. France presented a plan for phasing out energy sourced from coal by 2030, oil by 2045, and gas by 2050 through regulations and funding programs.

A draft plan for Colombia created in partnership with Colombian officials and U.K. government advisors as well as researchers from the University of Leeds envisioned cutting fossil fuel use by 90 percent by 2050 and drawing mostly on private investment, with some loans from public banks.

A key idea underpinning the Santa Marta conference was that a broad international shift toward renewable energy is inevitable due to its falling prices—and that countries will suffer financially if they don’t plan for this transition.

Some countries, including Colombia,........

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