Global climate talks got an unexpected boost when the head of the International Energy Agency said the Iran war had broken fossil fuel markets beyond repair.

“The damage is done,” Fatih Birol said in an interview with the Guardian last Friday.  The war’s interruptions to oil and gas supplies and the resulting price spikes for energy, fertilizer and other essential goods, Birol added, will forever turn countries away from fossil fuels toward renewables and other more secure and affordable sources of energy.

“The vase is broken, the damage is done — it will be very difficult to put the pieces back together again,” said Birol, whose agency the New York Times has described as “enormously influential” on the long-term plans of energy companies and investors around the world.  “This [crisis] will have permanent consequences for the global energy markets for many years to come.”

“I am very happy that Birol is saying this,” Irene Vélez Torres, the environment minister of Colombia, said in an interview in Santa Marta, the host city for a conference where some of the biggest economies in the world are meeting to develop a global “roadmap” to phase out the burning of oil, gas and coal, the primary driver of increasingly dangerous climate change.  

“It makes me more optimistic about what our conference can achieve,” Vélez added.  “It seems that many of us are seeing at the same time that fossil........

© National Observer