In the coastal light of Santa Marta, where the Caribbean breathes against the edge of Colombia and the wind moves softly through banners and palm leaves, a different kind of gathering has begun.

There are no grand declarations carried on the tide just yet—only the murmur of delegates arriving in hallways, the rustle of papers, the low and steady rhythm of a conversation the world has tried, and often failed, to hold together. In a season of fractured alliances and weary summits, more than 60 countries have come here to speak of endings and beginnings: the ending of fossil-fueled dependence, and the uncertain beginning of what comes after.

The conference, formally called the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels, was convened this week by Colombia and the Netherlands. It stands apart from the familiar machinery of the United Nations climate process, where consensus has often acted less like harmony and more like a locked gate. Here, organizers have tried to build something lighter and sharper—a coalition of countries willing to move without waiting for every hand in the room to rise in agreement.

And in that room, one chair remains conspicuously empty.

The administration of Donald Trump was not invited.

The absence is not accidental, nor is it merely symbolic. Organizers have described the gathering as a “coalition of doers,” a phrase that hangs in the air like both invitation and exclusion. Since returning to office, Trump has once again pulled the United States away from much of the global climate architecture—withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, stripping climate language from federal agencies, expanding drilling projects, and elevating voices aligned with the fossil fuel industry.

For many here, the calculation is simple and quietly radical: progress may be easier in the absence of the world’s most powerful dissenter.

“When the largest emitters have been present,” Colombia’s environment minister, Irene Vélez Torres, said this week, “they have pushed for a veto.” Her words carried the gravity of accumulated frustration. In Santa Marta, she argued, those gathered represent nearly half the world’s population—a constellation of producer nations, consumer nations, and climate-vulnerable states from both hemispheres. “We are a new power today,” she said.

There is something telling in that phrase.

Power, in the old sense, has often arrived in motorcades and press conferences, in declarations made by the wealthiest economies. But here, in the heat and salt air of northern Colombia, power is being reimagined as coordination—less thunder, more current. It is visible in smaller governments pressing for financing, in regional blocs negotiating energy transitions, in provinces and states stepping into spaces left vacant by national governments.

Even within the United States, absence is not absolute. Representatives from states such as California are attending, carrying their own climate commitments like lanterns through the dark. California continues to pursue carbon neutrality by 2045, using carbon markets and low-carbon fuel standards to guide investment. Officials there describe themselves as stable partners, even as federal policy shifts beneath them like unstable ground.

Elsewhere, examples are gathering. Quebec has moved to halt new fossil fuel exploration. Countries across the Global South are asking not whether to transition, but how to afford it.

Because beneath the language of ambition lies the quieter mathematics of debt.

Renewable energy may be cheaper to generate in the long run, but the transition itself asks for costly grids, storage systems, and the dismantling of old infrastructures that still keep economies alive. In wealthier nations, borrowing can come cheaply. In parts of Africa and Latin America, financing costs remain punishingly high. The result is what some researchers call a “debt–fossil fuel trap,” where nations continue pumping oil and gas not from ideology, but from necessity.

The global financial system, in this telling, becomes not a bridge but a wall.

And so Santa Marta is not only a conference about emissions. It is a conference about money, sovereignty, and time. About whether the future can arrive before the next storm season. About whether vulnerable nations can leap toward clean energy without collapsing under the weight of old debts.

The sea outside continues its patient motion.

Inside, delegates speak of grids and treaties, of solar fields and stranded assets, of methane and borrowing rates. The language is technical, but the stakes are intimate: cleaner air, steadier electricity, fewer fires, fewer floods, fewer names added to lists after each disaster.

In the wider world, the old climate forums remain stalled by consensus and contradiction. Even the recent G7 environment talks reportedly avoided direct discussion of climate to preserve unity. Here in Santa Marta, the strategy is different: if agreement cannot be found among all, then movement may begin among some.

And perhaps that is the quiet story unfolding on Colombia’s northern coast—not merely that Donald Trump was not invited, but that a new diplomatic shape is forming in the space left behind.

A smaller circle, perhaps.

But one moving faster.

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Sources Euronews Associated Press The Guardian Bloomberg Le Monde