I’m getting ready to go to COP28 in Dubai, UAE in a few hours. And, of course, I have two things on my mind: phasing out fossil fuels and transformative climate finance. Let’s start with fossil fuels. I was thrilled to see that yesterday (December 2), President Gustavo Petro announced that Colombia would formally join the bloc of nation-states seeking to negotiate a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. Colombia is now the 10th country to call for an international treaty to phase out fossil fuels with a comprehensive just transition framework. This is historic because Colombia is the first major fossil fuel exporter to endorse the Treaty initiative.

This is what President Petro said at COP28 when he announced Colombia’s endorsement of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative.

“It is a paradox that, at this table, together with populations that could disappear, there is a country like us, which also depends on oil, and which is committed to endorsing a treaty that implies zero new exploration projects in the world. My own society would say ‘how would the President produce such economic suicide?’, given that we depend on oil and coal. But this is not economic suicide. We are talking here about an ‘omnicide’, the risk of extinction of life on the planet. Here we are avoiding ‘omnicide’ on planet Earth. There is no other way, the rest are illusions. There is a very powerful economic power around oil, coal and gas. And they act to prevent changes, to maintain, in a suicidal way, their possibilities for more years of profit in the short term. Today we face an immense confrontation between fossil capital and human life. And we must choose a side. Any human being knows that we must choose life. I have no doubt which position to take: between fossil capital and life, we choose the side of life.”

Colombia now joins Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Niue, Timor-Leste, Antigua and Barbuda, and Palau calling for a Treaty to phase out fossil fuels, in addition to The European Parliament, The World Health Organisation, 101 Nobel laureates, 100 cities and subnational governments, hundreds of scientists, health institutions, faith groups, civil society organizations, and more than half a million individuals.

Colombia is taking a leadership role that many countries in the Global South can learn from. In a way, Colombia has the same structural deficiencies that challenge most countries in the Global South. Colombia’s export revenues mainly come from raw materials, cash crops, and low value-added manufacturing (crude oil 23%, coal 10%, gold 6%, coffee 6%, cut flowers 3%, etc), while its imports tend to be much more diversified products, including refined oil products, core crops like corn and wheat, and high value-added manufactured products like industrial machinery, automobiles, and pharmaceutical products. Colombia’s structural trade deficit puts downward pressure on its exchange rate, which in turn pushes the country into an endless cycle of external borrowing to desperately stabilize its the exchange rate (otherwise imported products bring inflationary pressures to the domestic economy), which accelerates the external debt vicious cycle. Colombia’s debt service has routinely hovered around 30% of export revenues.

Colombia’s Right to Development

The dominant narrative that is being pushed by fossil fuel companies in the Global South is that our countries have a right to development and have the right to use our natural resources and our territorial sovereignty to develop. They also play the emissions game by convincing our governments that we shouldn’t listen to Global North-funded climate activists who want to deny us our sovereign right to development since we didn’t exceed our carbon budget, so we should be allowed to continue the extraction of fossil fuels so we can develop and thrive. This is a dangerous distraction aimed at securing additional demand for fossil fuels in a world that is set to decarbonize and shift away from fossil fuels. It is also designed to lock the Global South into an obsolete, expensive, inefficient, unhealthy, uncompetitive, uneconomical energy system.

Therefore, it is precisely because Colombia has a right to development that it should choose to diversify its economy, invest in food sovereignty and agroecology, invest in renewable energy sovereignty, and invest in high value added industrial policies. I discussed this in a recent podcast interview with Climate Justice Central, as well as in an interview with African Arguments and this Your Voice podcast.

Demand for Colombian oil and coal is stalling and will decline rapidly in the next couple of decades. What should Colombia do today to avoid a major crisis when its export revenues collapse while its debt service continues to rise. Therefore, it is precisely because Colombia has the right to development that it should take a new development strategy that reduces its external debt burden, builds resilience, and produces a more sophisticated economic development model that leads to structural transformation.

The Fossil Fuel Production Gap

The latest Production Gap report published earlier last month confirms once again what the scientific community has been telling us about the importance of phasing out fossil fuels. We are currently on track to extract and burn twice as much fossil fuels in 2030 than what we’re allowed to if we’re going to meet the climate challenge of keeping global temperature below 1.5 by the end of the century.

The findings from the production gap essentially validate all the work we’re doing on the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. First, we must stop the deployment of additional fossil fuel architecture (in reality we’e adding $500 billion of new capital expenditure CAPEX in fossil fuels), and Second, we must rapidly phase out fossil fuels starting with coal, then oil, and gas. That is exactly what Colombia intends to do by leading the concert of nations by signing a treaty.

Collective Suicide Pact or Financial Fraud?

A couple of days before COP28 was officially open, the BBC reported that the host of COP28, the UAE, was planning to double dip by simultaneously hosting the most important climate summit and also signing lucrative oil deals with presidents and prime ministers from around the world. I was asked to comment on this for Middle East Eye, so here is what I had to say).

In a way, this is not surprising, fossil fuel companies and their lobbyists are engaged in a systemic campaign of distractions, obstructions, manipulations, and pure criminal activity. And I do not use the term ‘criminal’ lightly. Why? First, if we take the science seriously, we wouldn’t be making plans to add new fossil fuel infrastructure, instead we would be negotiating a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty to phase out existing infrastructure within a coherent and comprehensive just transition framework.

Second, if we take the economics seriously, we wouldn’t be investing in a sector that is guaranteed to generate stranded assets (both financial and physical) before those investments generate the expected rate of return.

Therefore, whether what the fossil fuel industry is conspiring to do is signing a collective suicide pact for humanity or committing financial fraud by duping investors with stranded assets, it is criminal and it should be treated accordingly.

I truly believe that if we don’t address this issue head-on in Dubai during COP28, we might as well have the fossil fuel companies host the next COP at their headquarters and be very clear about who is actually running the show.