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Wait, Could This Be a Climate Conference That Actually Works?

As the Iran war highlights fossil-fuel risks, a coalition of the willing pursues a global phase out.

A press conference from the First International Conference on the Transitioning Away From Fossil Fuels.

Santa Marta, Colombia—Global climate talks got an unexpected boost Friday 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. 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 over the next week 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 fuels cannot provide energy security, because fossil fuels are subject to scarcity, and scarcity can be manipulated. Our energy sovereignty as well as our climate survival require moving to other energy sources.”

Although Birol has previously said plummeting prices for renewables herald the “beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era,” rarely if ever has he so bluntly........

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