This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Looking out to sea from the grey sandy beaches of Santa Marta, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, it is never hard to spot evidence of the country’s thriving fossil fuel export trade. Oil tankers ride at anchor on the horizon, and sometimes, locals say, lumps of coal wash up on the shore, blown off the collier ships that carry cargoes from the nearby mines.

It was here, on Wednesday evening, that the Colombian government took a bold step to shift its economy—and that of the rest of the world—away from dependence on coal, gas and oil and into a new era of clean energy. With the first-ever conference on “transitioning away from fossil fuels,” the host joined nearly 60 countries determined to loosen the grip of petrostates on the world’s future.

“This is the beginning of a new global climate democracy,” Irene Vélez Torres, Colombia’s environment minister and chair of the talks, said in closing remarks that celebrated a “new method” of bringing together high-ambition governments, parliamentarians and civil society groups to accelerate the decarbonisation of their economies.

“This is the beginning of a new global climate democracy.”

At this moment in history, the conference may also mark a new global divide between “electro-democracies” and petro-dictatorships.

The initiative has come at a pivotal moment in the climate fight. Oil and gas prices have soared since the US-Israeli attacks on Iran, the second such crisis within five years, after the price rises that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Households around the world are spiralling into debt, farmers cannot afford fertiliser, and governments are remembering that a dependency on volatile fossil fuels is holding them hostage to geopolitical forces they cannot control.

The global economy faces a triple whammy: rising energy costs, rising food costs that follow, and the spectre of rampant inflation that will raise interest rates and add to the cost of servicing debt. Both rich and poor nations are feeling the impact, but the poor, with their higher levels of debt and lower reserves, are suffering more.

Repeated oil shocks blighted the 1970s, and the current crisis is not only greater than those but more impactful than all previous crises combined, according to Fatih Birol, the world’s leading energy economist and chief of the International Energy Agency, the gold standard in energy research. “This is bigger than all the biggest crises........

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