In the Caribbean city of Santa Marta, where the mountains fall gently into the sea and the air carries both salt and heat, delegates are gathering beneath palm shadows to discuss the future of energy.

The streets move with their usual rhythm—vendors arranging fruit beneath awnings, buses exhaling at corners, fishing boats rocking in the harbor. Yet inside conference halls cooled by glass and machinery, another tide is being measured: the tide of oil prices, the tide of politics, the tide of a warming planet pressing against old habits.

This week, nearly 60 governments have come together in Colombia for the first international forum dedicated solely to discussing how the world might move away from fossil fuels.

The timing feels almost cruel in its clarity.

As ministers arrive with briefing papers and climate pledges, war in the Middle East has sent oil and gas markets into turmoil. The conflict involving Iran has disrupted shipping lanes and tightened global supply, pushing fuel prices sharply upward across Asia and Europe. In many countries, shortages have begun to ripple through transport networks and power systems. In homes far from the Gulf, the cost arrives quietly—at gas stations, in utility bills, in grocery receipts.

And so, the question hanging over Santa Marta is not only environmental.

It is economic. Strategic. Immediate.

Organized by Colombia and the Netherlands, the summit is not designed to produce another broad declaration. There are no new sweeping targets expected, no ceremonial signing beneath bright lights. Instead, officials say the focus is practical: how to reform subsidies that keep oil and gas artificially cheap; how to build financial tools that make clean energy investment easier; how to encourage industries to replace gas with electrification; how to make the transition not only desirable, but survivable.

There is a weariness now with promises.

Since the landmark agreement at COP28 in 2023 to “transition away” from fossil fuels, progress has been slow and often stalled by the politics of consensus. In the vast machinery of United Nations climate negotiations, nearly 200 nations must move together, and the heaviest wheels often resist motion. Major producers, including Saudi Arabia, have blocked or diluted proposals. The language of ambition has too often outrun the reality of implementation.

Santa Marta is an attempt to move differently.

A coalition of willing nations—among them Brazil, Germany, Canada, Nigeria, and others representing more than half of global GDP—has come not to renegotiate the future, but to compare maps toward it.

Notably absent are the United States and China, the world’s two largest carbon emitters.

Their absence lingers in the room like an empty chair at a family table.

So too does the absence of major Gulf oil producers, whose economies remain bound tightly to the fuels under discussion. Their silence reflects the contradiction at the center of this moment: the same conflict that strengthens the argument for energy independence also drives some countries back toward coal and emergency fossil fuel reserves in the short term.

Security and sustainability, for now, are uneasy companions.

Elsewhere, in London, another conversation unfolds at the International Maritime Organization, where negotiators are discussing carbon pricing and fuel standards for global shipping. The sea itself has become part of this debate. Higher insurance costs, rerouted tankers, and disrupted maritime trade have turned abstract emissions targets into immediate logistical questions.

In Santa Marta, officials say the Iran war has exposed the fragility of fossil-fuel dependency more clearly than any climate model.

A single strait narrows. A warship moves. A mine is laid in dark water.

And economies tremble.

Perhaps that is the quiet lesson beneath the speeches: that climate vulnerability and geopolitical vulnerability are not separate storms, but the same weather seen from different windows.

Outside, the Caribbean remains blue.

Inside, nations speak of grids, incentives, batteries, and laws.

The world still runs on oil. The planes still fly on kerosene. The ships still burn bunker fuel as they cross uncertain seas.

But in Santa Marta this week, amid the heat and the conference lights, there is at least an acknowledgment that the old system has become both dangerous and expensive.

The war has raised prices.

The planet has raised warnings.

And somewhere between crisis and necessity, the conversation about leaving fossil fuels behind has grown louder.

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Sources Reuters Agence France-Presse The Guardian International Energy Agency Carbon Brief